


That Friend of His

by SteadfastBrightStar



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 1920s, AU, Country House AU, First World War, M/M, some war stuff but not enough for a violence warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-27
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 11:25:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 57,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1856350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SteadfastBrightStar/pseuds/SteadfastBrightStar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the spring of 1914, Mathias comes to work at Lille Skarstind, the crumbling country house of the once-rich Bondevik family. There, he falls in love with Lukas, the young master of the house. But war is a cruel thing. It will break their hearts and spirits, change Mathias from a boy into a man and leave Lukas with a secret as hidden and shameful as Dorian Gray's portrait.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Mountain House

May 1914

It was late in the evening when Mathias arrived at the house, the light thickening as the sun began to set and the shadows lying dark along the pathway and clustered among the trees. There was something oddly abandoned about the place. The fountains flanking the driveway spurted up in irregular jets, firing off to an unsettled rhythm like a pair of damaged hearts, and the topiary hedges were untended, overgrowing their patterns and blurring out their own shapes. He paused to light a cigarette and looked around the gardens with disapproval. He had heard of houses like this before – old, decaying houses, dying with their last owners. He had seen things in newspapers, advertisements selling off their contents piece by piece. This was a place where everything was running out – time, money and heirs. And yet here he was, with the letter offering him a job there scrunched up deep in his pocket, hoping to be taken on as an odd-job boy.

Mathias took an irritated sip of smoke and walked on. Such a position was beneath him, that much was certain. A few weeks short of eighteen, he had already spent four years in service at Asterley Hall, a vulgar faux-gothic mansion that gave off an overwhelming impression of rapidly-gained wealth and the status anxiety of the nouveau riche. He had been happy there, second footman and with the prospect of rising further in the servants’ hierarchy in the future. Well. So much for all that. An ill-advised entanglement with a one of the gardeners had put a stop to his plans. Caught at it by the butler, his choice had been a rather stark one: leave without a reference, or leave with the police. Hence why he was here, rather lower down the ladder than he had begun, and with nothing to prove his four years of hard work. And all for a few stolen strawberries bruised and warm from being hidden inside his lover’s shirt, and for a few kisses soft with juice and pungent with tobacco… He sighed, tossed his finished cigarette into a bush and straightened his tie. It was time to go back into service.

Mathias knocked on the back door and waited for a response, nervously tightening his grip on the handles of his suitcase and looking up at the shrouded windows. So this was Lille Skarstind, or ‘the mountain house’ as the locals in the village down the hill called it. He pictured the interior of the house as empty, dust thick on every surface and pale dowagers drifting from room to room. His knock echoed deeply through the corridors and then vanished into silence, a few moments passing until he heard sharp, precise footsteps approaching. Swallowing slightly, he smoothed his unruly hair and stood up a little straighter. The door swung open.  
“Hello? Ah, you must be the new manservant.” The speaker was a handsome man in his thirties, a little shorter than Mathias, with ash-blond hair and a rather severe set to his eyebrows.  
Mathias nodded and mumbled, “Yes, sir.”  
The man gave a restrained smile. “Good, good – you seem to know the drill already,” He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe how many servants go round to the front door on their first day,” He looked Mathias up and down, as though he could sense that the truth was being kept from him. “You’ve not been in service before, have you? You didn’t mention it in your letter.”  
“My aunt was a housemaid,” Mathias lied. He lied easily and out of necessity. After all, he thought with a hint of bitterness, it wasn’t as though he could disclose the circumstances of his dismissal. “But I used to be a labourer myself.”  
“Very well,” the man replied. “I’m Arthur Kirkland – Mr Kirkland to you. I’m the butler here.” He extended a hand and Mathias shook it.  
“Mathias Køhler.” he said, a little surprised. From the style of the letter, he’d expected Arthur to be older, a loyal servant clinging to the remnants of the family that had first employed him.  
Arthur led him inside, giving him a cursory tour of the maze of kitchens downstairs. They were far too empty, the distant chattering of two or three female voices the only evidence of other servants. Most of the rooms were unused, the last ashes long ago scraped out of the grates, and half-open doors revealed dark, empty larders.  
“Interesting surname you’ve got there, Køhler.” Arthur commented after a while.  
Mathias nodded absently, preoccupied by the state of the house. “My father was Danish.” he explained.  
“You’ll be in good company, then,” Arthur replied. “The Bondeviks here can trace their family back to Norway. They came over in the 1680s, I believe, in the court of Prince George of Denmark.” Arthur’s voice had taken on a rather bored tone, like that of a teacher teaching the same curriculum year on year. So they were one of those noble families, Mathias realised – one of those families who, in the absence of a future, glorified their past.

Eventually, they emerged from the kitchens into a narrow hallway which had a door at one end and a bare wooden staircase at the other.  
“I’ll leave you to get yourself settled in then,” Arthur said, looking at his pocket watch with a slight frown. Quarter to eight, Mathias thought – high time the butler went to oversee the serving of dinner. He pointed upstairs. “Straight up to the attic and your room’s the third on the right.”  
“Thank you.” Mathias replied, turning to go.  
Arthur called him back. “Just a little advice, lad,” he said. “Make sure you’re well rested tonight. You’re replacing quite a few people, so you’ll be working hard in the morning, and more so when the boys come back from school next month. Supper at half past nine.”  
With that, he disappeared through the door that separated the servants from their masters, and Mathias slowly began his ascent.

…  
June 1914

The bedroom felt as if someone had died in it. There were clouds of cobwebs strung across the corners, the bed was stripped to its cold sheet and a weak sun gleamed through the window as sullenly as a scolded schoolchild. Mathias stood in the doorway for a moment, unwilling to cross the threshold. The air in the room seemed to have a different quality – thicker, perhaps, or heavier than the air outside, stale and unbreathed. The room was undisturbed, mirror-lake untouched, and it felt strange for Mathias to be stepping in and shattering the emptiness, sending ripples all through it. But step in he must, and did. It was necessary because life was finally returning to the house. After a month of creeping around the dust-filled corridors and trying to force open locked doors that were warped and swollen with water and heat, a month as lad-of-all-work and only once catching sight of the widowed Mrs Bondevik through a window as he pulled weeds in the garden, her sons were returning from boarding school.

Mathias reached up with a duster and pulled down the webs, the great mass of them like fishing nets or a bridal train. They clung to his fingers with their faint stickiness and he prised them off with a grimace. He undid the catch on the window to let a breeze into the stuffy room and his hands came away streaked with rust. He looked down at them with distaste. Within a week of his arrival, Mathias had had his initial suspicions confirmed – the Bondeviks were poor. This was not true poverty. It was not hunger or disease or going barefoot. It was poverty strictly in the relative sense – genteel poverty, but poverty nonetheless. It was the cracks in the best china, the walls denuded of their pictures, the paint on the window frames that flaked off at the slightest touch. It had crept in over the years like damp, and like all things that could not be repaired, it had been concealed. There was a sadness to Lille Skarstind, as though the house was aware of its own decline.

Nonetheless, Mathias felt a faint pricking of excitement in his stomach as he went about making the bed. He was looking forward to seeing the sons of the family, even though he knew his interactions with them would be minimal. Arthur was a stickler for that sort of propriety, even with the way things were, and he was far too proud a man to ever let on that they were all living in somewhat reduced circumstances. He would enforce the myriad rules of society until the house collapsed around them, Mathias knew that. 

Having made the bed, Mathias turned his attention to the bookshelves, running his duster along the spines with a playful motion. He scanned the titles for something he recognised, something that would give away something of the young man who owned these books. His eyes flicked along shelves of algebra and geometry, a Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, all twelve books of the Aeneid in the original Latin and a few things written in a strange script that Mathias half-recognised as Greek. A scholar, then, he thought. Studious, this boy, whoever he was. On the bottom shelf, the schoolbooks gave way to a few more personal things. There were a couple of Dickens novels, Tennyson’s Poetical Works, Paradise Lost, a well-loved copy of Our Island Story and, tucked into the corner as though an embarrassing concession to sentiment, A Child’s Garden of Verses. Attracted by the thought of a childhood that had never quite belonged to him, it was this book that Mathias plucked from the shelf. He felt its comfortable weight in his hands, opening it up to the first page and reading the inscription there, done in the immaculate copperplate of a society lady:  
To Lukas, on his birthday,  
I can hardly believe that my little grandson is already five years old! Now that you are such a big, clever boy, I hope that you will enjoy reading this book and sharing it with your lillebror!  
With much love,  
Grandma

Mathias blinked, shocked by the Norwegian word. Two hundred years the Bondevik family had been here. Two hundred years and as English as they came, yet they still hung on to the language, the odd scattered words like relics. Lillebror. Lille Skarstind. The name of a mighty mountain to grace the gentle slope of an English hill. He closed his eyes. It all reminded him unbearably of his father – his father, the Danish fisherman, raising his motherless son in a rough port of shipyards and shouting sailors and smoke and melting iron. He remembered his father’s hands – a working man’s hands, never soft but always gentle – and how they had guided him carefully down the narrow harbour steps to the boat. He remembered the fish glittering in the net and the scales that remained in the bottom of the boat, gleaming like silver sixpences, even long after the catch had been cleared out. His father had spoken Danish to him, a language so like the Norwegian that had so pierced him, but it was all lost to him now. It was the language of the place his father had left, the language of his nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and yet he could not summon a word of it.

His father was dead, carried off by some illness or another that had come over him the winter Mathias was five years old. He remembered the charity people who had come to take him to his new home, and he remembered himself, the distraught little boy, screaming at them in a confused mixture of English and Danish. Once he’d got to the orphanage, the other children had laughed at him, laughed at the thick, dark sounds and up-and-down rhythms of his language, and so he had let it shrivel away inside him. It wasn’t as though he’d ever need it.

There was a knock at the open door and he turned sharply towards the sound, hastily shoving the book back onto the shelf. It was one of the maids, and Mathias quickly stood up, hoping that his distress didn’t show on his face.  
“Mr Kirkland says he wants you out front,” she said breathlessly, cheeks pink from her rush to deliver the message. “The boys have just come.”  
“Suppose I’d best be off then,” Mathias replied. He felt a spike of apprehensiveness shooting through him, and, with a last look back at the now-presentable room, went out to meet his employers.

…

Mathias knew, as it is sometimes possible to know, that he would remember this moment forever. He would remember those awful arrhythmic fountains and the weeds springing up through the gravel of the driveway. He would remember the lukewarm sun and the heavy humidity that was the price of warmth in England. And above all, he would remember the people he saw – Arthur, but he was familiar, and the strangers he was talking to. Two boys, two pale, beautiful boys. He knew that they were brothers, the Bondevik brothers – the heir and the spare, as such pairings were termed – but even if he had not known, he would have guessed. There was a vague resemblance between them, like each was a badly-altered painting of the other, and the older one – Lukas, he must be Lukas – had his hand on his brother’s shoulder. They were dressed in school uniform – old enough now for long trousers, having outgrown the shorts and socks Mathias had worn until he left school at twelve – navy blazers and straw boaters with a black band around them. 

Arthur saw him approach and called out to him.  
“Køhler! You’re to help bring the bags up,” he informed him. He inclined his head to the two boys. “Mr Lukas, Køhler here will take yours. Master Emil, I shall take yours.” Arthur bent and picked up Emil’s bulging suitcase as though it weighed nothing, then stood waiting for Emil to follow him. The brothers looked at each other for a brief moment, then Lukas released his shoulder and let him follow Arthur inside.  
Mathias looked up at Lukas and felt anything he might have wanted to say die in his throat. Lukas was perfect. His eyes were dark blue with a peculiar dullness to them; they were the colour of a starless night. His hair glimmered with the palest shade of gold, an achingly delicate colour. He was full-lipped, with cheekbones like buttresses, and in him Mathias saw a saint, an angel, a statue – a thing painted and gilded and made to be worshipped. He took a deep breath and was suddenly desperate for a cigarette – anything to calm him and make the warmth drain from his cheeks. Fixing his eyes on a distant point, he decided to take refuge in pleasantries.  
“I trust you had a comfortable journey, sir.” he said, picking up the suitcase. It was smart and shining, with Lukas Bondevik, Lord Rochester’s School for Boys embossed on the lid.  
Lukas nodded. “I did, thank you.” he replied, in a quiet, deep voice.  
Mathias took a step back, a gesture of submission. “And now, if you’ll just lead the way, sir.” he said, gesturing towards the front door.  
“Of course.” Lukas replied, and together they entered the cool of the house.

Once they reached the bedroom, Mathias was momentarily wrong-footed. Unpacking luggage was a job for maids, and he was unsure what Lukas was expecting him to do. He brought the suitcase into room, and then paused uncertainly.  
“Would you like me to unpack this now, sir?” he asked Lukas, who had already pulled off his hat and blazer and thrown them onto his chair.  
“Yes, if you would.” he replied.  
Mathias nodded and undid the clasps. He worked in silence, hanging the clothes back in the wardrobe. It felt strangely intimate to be touching them. He had never had dealings with clothing in his old job, but now he received a small, secret thrill from holding these things that had touched Lukas, though they were all washed and held no trace of him. He shook his head. The last thing he needed was to fall in love again. 

The silence grew and he felt like he was intruding. Lukas seemed like a private person, and he sat on his bed as though there under sufferance, waiting with ill-disguised impatience for Mathias to leave. Folded inside the suitcase was a second school blazer, and as Mathias pulled it out, Lukas spoke to him.  
“You can bring that to Emil when you’ve finished here,” he said. “That and all my uniform.”  
“Have you finished school then?” Mathias asked. He was eager to continue the conversation, but the servant in him was horrified. Hand-me-downs? They really were poor, then, these Bondeviks.  
Lukas nodded. “I shall be going up to Cambridge at the beginning of October.”  
“What will you be studying?” Mathias asked from the depths of the suitcase.  
“Classics.” Lukas replied shortly, as if it was a stupid question. And perhaps it was, Mathias thought. What else was there for a young man who never expected to work? What reason did he have to study anything else?

Mathias lifted the last things out of the suitcase – a pile of books – and stood up to leave. He would have loved to stay and talk for a while, but his work was done and there was no reason for him to stay any longer.  
“Would you like the case put under the bed, sir?” he asked, slipping back into his customary role.  
“If you would.” Lukas replied absently, already reaching for one of the books. He had turned away from him, and he and Mathias were lost in their separate worlds once more.

…

“You, Mr Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…”

Mathias silently spoke the familiar words as he read the passage once again, letting the writing fill him with its dull heat, a sort of abstracted desire for no one in particular. His bedside candle flamed up suddenly, then settled again, its thrusting shadow clear against the white wall of his room. The Picture of Dorian Gray was his favourite book, the only one he owned, bought on one of his Sunday afternoons off back when he was sixteen. He had been wondering about himself then, and about the way he was, and had come to hear of Oscar Wilde’s novel about a beautiful young man, statuesque yet a moral wreck, and of the forbidden desire that supposedly permeated every page. He remembered the lengthy train journey all the way to the next town – he dared not go to the local shops for fear one of the maids might catch him there – and the frantic search through the shelves of the bookshop to find it. Most of all, he remembered the ride back to Asterley Hall through the darkening countryside, the book wrapped in brown paper and hidden inside his jacket, its sharp corners pressing into the flesh just below his ribcage and the delicious feeling of having taken his first step on the road to utter, glorious ruin.

From the back page, he removed one of his treasured postcards. You could buy them if you asked nicely, paid well and knew where to look, and Mathias had amassed a collection of six or so. This one showed a young man of about twenty leaning against a wall, bare-chested and smoking a cigarette. Mathias liked this one, and as he looked at it, he felt the familiar stirring heat of arousal rising in him, soothing in its strange way. He was frustrated, that was his problem. Always so frustrated, always so angry at something or other in the way that only young men can be. Rose-red youth, he thought, rose-white boyhood. He thought of a rose, the fleshy eroticism of its not-quite-open centre, and when he fell asleep his dreams were deep red, and hot, and when he woke, he was drenched in sweat and his own shame and thinking, desperately, of Lukas.

…

Author’s Note: Hey guys! Missed me? I’ve certainly missed writing, but many extrememly stressful months and 26 exams later, I’m back in the fanfiction game. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the chapter and that it wasn’t too terrible – I certainly hope I haven’t lost my touch! 


	2. The Height of Summer

The summer wore on, the days lengthening until everyone, even the servants with their sixteen-hour shifts, slept and rose in the creamy light of dawn and dusk. The heat crept into everything, from the water that lay lukewarm and stagnant in the scalloped bowls of the fountains to the general feeling of listlessness that affected all the household and the lady of the house’s request for cold salads rather than heavy meals of meat and roast vegetables. Mathias had bought a cheap translation of The Iliad down in the village for the sole purpose of impressing Lukas, and the sweat from his fingers would leave sooty smudges of ink on the thin paper as he turned pages in the stuffiness of his room during nights that refused to fall. He made slow progress. It wasn’t half as good as Dorian Gray. He lived for the moments when the cook would send him out to the icehouse to collect this or that bit of meat or churn of butter and he would stand in the cool darkness, picking up shards of ice and letting them melt down his back or through his hair. In the evenings, he would fill the tin bath with his allotted five inches of cold water and squeeze the sponge out over his head, wincing at the pricking of the freezing droplets. 

He was as happy as could be expected. He liked visiting the village and letting his servant’s mask drop so that his local accent broadened and thickened and his speech became littered with bits of arcane dialect. There was a good crowd down at the pub, most nights, and he had enough saved up to have a couple of drinks. He had come back tipsy one evening, taking several minutes to open the gates and then giggling at the thought of how Arthur would react if he burst in through the front door and announced himself as the guest of honour. He had climbed the stairs carefully, stifling further giggles brought on by a particularly unflattering portrait of a Bondevik ancestor, and had passed by Lukas’s room. Despite the hour, there had been a shaft of light seeping out from under the door, and the faint sound of the gramophone going, the melody – a woman’s voice – rising thinly over the hiss of static on the recording. And, through some combination of the alcohol running through his body, and the unexpectedness of hearing someone sing as though it was a requiem for the setting sun, and the knowledge that Lukas was just a few feet away from him but so completely unreachable, Mathias had felt an unbearable sadness threatening to break out of him.   
“Goodnight,” he had whispered through the closed door, wishing that Lukas could somehow hear him. “You’re beautiful. Goodnight.”

…

The glasses of lemonade were incredibly tempting in the still, dead midday heat of the garden, freshly homemade with several generous spoonfuls of sugar in each one. Mathias was gasping for a drink. He would have to beg one of the lemonades off the cook later, if she was in a good mood and he promised to help the maids with the washing-up after dinner. But these were not for him, as the cook had reminded him with a maternal cuff around the back of the head – they were for Lukas and Emil. 

He caught sight of the brothers straightaway, sprawled out under one of the spreading oak trees. Lukas, as usual, was reading; Emil, bored, was throwing a cricket ball up in the air and catching it, sighing every time he missed and it rolled away from him. Lukas looked up as Mathias approached and closed his book with an air of relief. Emil continued his game of catch, occasionally blowing an unruly strand of hair out of his face with an exasperated sound. Mathias covered the last bit of distance between them and set the tray of drinks down in front of Lukas, glad to finally be out of the sun. Cloudy shapes moved in front of his vision, seared onto his eyes by the brightness of the light, and he blinked to clear them.  
“There you are, sir,” he said with a smile directed at Lukas. “Freshly made this morning, so they were.”  
“Thank you, Køhler.” Lukas replied in the neutral, accentless speech of the upper class, and Mathias felt embarrassingly rustic.  
Mathias had seen Lukas many times since their first meeting, but their exchanges had never amounted to more than curt nods and a muttered ‘good morning’. Now, he saw his chance to have a proper conversation, no matter what the rules of society dictated.  
“Is that any good?” he asked, gesturing to the book that Lukas had so gladly discarded.  
Lukas sighed. “Well, it’s The Iliad, so I suppose it must be good, but I’ve read it so many times now that I’ve stopped taking it in.  
Mathias beamed widely. “Funny you should say that, sir – I’m reading it myself.”  
Lukas looked momentarily taken aback, then recovered himself and returned his face to its usual imperturbable expression. He quoted something at Mathias, clearly expecting him to understand.  
Mathias blushed, caught out. “I never learnt Latin, sir.” he admitted ruefully.  
Emil sniggered. Losing concentration, he dropped his ball and it rolled off down the slope. Lukas shot him a glare.  
“Go and get that.” he said sharply.  
“But Lukas…” Emil whined, looking at Mathias as if to say can’t he do it?  
“Go on.” Lukas ordered, dismissing him with a wave of his hand. Emil rolled his eyes and stood up reluctantly, scanning the undergrowth for any sign of the ball.

Lukas turned back to Mathias.  
“I can’t stand it when he’s rude like that,” he said apologetically. “I suppose it comes of being the youngest, though he’s sixteen now.”  
“I don’t mind it, sir.” Mathias replied, a servant once more.  
“However,” Lukas said, the faintest ghost of a smile rising to his lips. “The Iliad was written in Greek. Easy mistake to make, on account of all those old authors borrowing from each other.”  
Mathias nodded as though that was the reason for his confusion. “I’m only reading it in translation, sir.”  
Lukas shrugged, considering. “Well, it’s as good a place as any to start.” he said. 

They lapsed into silence. Lukas watched Emil searching in the bushes for the lost ball, then giving up and trudging back to his position under the tree. Mathias noticed that, for all his staying in the shade, Lukas had caught the sun on his cheeks, leaving little smudges of pink. They seemed unbearably delicate, like the wisps of colour on the face of a china doll, and Mathias felt like kissing them. Lukas had his sleeves rolled up, revealing his pale forearms, and Mathias wanted to kiss the insides of his beautiful wrists, to trace the faded-ink-blue veins right up to the crooks of his arms. He bit down on his lip and looked away. No one said anything over the whirring of crickets. Emil lit a cigarette. Lukas sipped his lemonade.  
“I’ll be back for the glasses in a little while, sir.” Mathias said.  
“Very well, Køhler.” Lukas replied and Mathias, sensing that he was dismissed, turned and headed back into the heat of high summer.

…

The sheet threw up a flurry of dust as Mathias pulled it off the piano and let it slump to the floor like a discarded shroud. He lifted the lid and played a few experimental chords. It was horrendously out of tune – each note sounded flat and took a long time to die away, as though the strings attached to the keys needed tightening.   
“We don’t have time for that, Køhler!” Arthur reprimanded him. He pulled a tattered notepad out of his pocket. “Right,” he muttered to himself, scribbling in it with a pencil stub. “Piano to be tuned, ten shillings most probably.”  
Mathias shut the lid again with a pout and looked around the dusty ballroom, trying to imagine the chandeliers lit up again, the cracks in the paintwork covered up again and himself doing what he had so often done at Asterley Hall – opening doors, serving the food, announcing the guests and generally being an attractive piece of furniture. Footmen were employed for their looks. Like most orphanage boys, he had been destined for an army career, but after growing five inches and beginning to shave in the space of three months when he was fourteen, it was decided that he would earn a much better living in one of the great houses.  
He glanced over at Arthur, who had wandered off to inspect the damp stains blackening the gold scrollwork along the edge of the ceiling. He was frowning and making notes in his little book, probably singling out things to sell to fund all the work that needed to be done. And for a good reason. There was to be party at Lille Skarstind, the first event of its kind in several years. It was an important chance for the Bondevik family, as owners of the local Big House, to reposition themselves firmly at the centre of provincial society. But restoring one’s social reputation did not come cheap, hence the need to sell things off. Mathias, on Arthur’s orders, had already assembled a sizeable pile of objects to go to the auction house in the county town. They were broken things, mostly – tarnished candlesticks, portraits with their cracked and yellowed half-smiles, tea sets with missing saucers and chipped cups – but it saddened him nonetheless to see these relics of the family’s prosperity hawked off like scrap metal. It reminded him of a frosty morning when he was five years old, all the furniture from his family cottage dragged out into the street and his box of toys carelessly upended, all the things his father had painstakingly carved for him spilled out into the street. He remembered a firm hand in his pulling him along and whispering promises – false promises – of the beautiful toys awaiting him in his new home. The neighbourhood children had come out to scavenge from the pile. He had looked back at them as the charity people led him away and they had met his gaze with the narrow-eyed, untrusting glare of street children. He remembered two boys getting into a tussle over a particularly fine model train, the victor running off with the prize clutched to his chest and the loser beginning to cry, the desolate wail of a hungry child rising over the smoky harbour.

“Køhler,” Arthur said again, drawing Mathias out of his trance. “Make yourself useful, lad,” He looked over at the corner of the room, as if expecting something to be there, then, when he saw that it was not, sighed with a harsh sound of irritation. “Right. Well. Thought I’d brought it,” he said to himself. He turned to Mathias. “Go out to the shed and get that bucket of paint,” He gestured to the walls with their paper stained and wrinkled like old sheets. “The blue, please. I want all this covered.”  
“Yes, sir.” Mathias replied, already dreading the hours to be spent at the task.  
“And mind you do it well,” Arthur warned him. “If we’re to find a bride for Master Lukas, we’ll have to see that her family’s impressed.”  
“Indeed, sir.” Mathias replied weakly, turning to go. He had known all along, at least subconsciously, that looking for potential wives was the main reason for throwing the party. The Bondeviks were too poor to entertain. They certainly wouldn’t do it without a clear motive. He knew it was pointless to be upset about something so inevitable, but nonetheless he felt a sort of miserable frustration rising in him. This was the way it always was; the way it had to be, for men like him. The only true invisibility was to be found in placing oneself above suspicion; in marrying, in conforming. He felt a sort of despairing anger rise in him as he realised that, no matter what he did, he could never change who he was – his outward appearance, yes, but never his nature; never the rhythm to which his sinful heart had so stubbornly chosen to beat.

…

July 1914

“I did hear about that, yes…”  
“Oh yes, I was just as shocked as you are…”  
“What a disgrace to her poor mother…”  
“And then he said to me…”

Mathias moved through the crowd as unobtrusively as possible, snippets of conversation drifting down to him like offcuts from a dressmaker’s table. With practised ease, he navigated the clusters of guests, his tray of champagne flutes at just the right height for them to take one as he passed by. This was what he was used to doing, dressed in his familiar old suit of tailcoat, waistcoat and black bow tie – black for servants, white for masters; a world of social information in a single twist of silk. He studied the partygoers with the faintly haughty eye of an experienced servant, able to judge someone’s provenance from twenty paces. In contrast to Asterley Hall, where guests had turned up in motor cars and dresses fresh from the London Season, there was something slightly off-centre here. The clothes were outmoded by ever such a miniscule amount – a slightly dated cut to a suit, perhaps, or the hair up in a way popular two years ago, or scarves draped in such a way as to disguise fraying necklines – but Mathias noticed nonetheless, and he noticed that these guests were really not in the top flight of society. The family at Asterley Hall had hosted royalty; the Bondeviks were hosting traders, gentleman farmers, upwardly-mobile members of the middle class attracted by the chance to see the dying beast that was Lille Skarstind and to pick over its carcass like crows. They were the sort of people who saw the decline as the upper class as a victory, and celebrated it as though they had brought it about themselves.

He caught sight of Lukas and, as discreetly as possible, changed course so that he could approach and hopefully eavesdrop on whatever he was saying to the woman he was talking to – Mathias vaguely remembered Arthur telling him that she was the wife of a man who owned a textile factory in the next town.  
“… That sounds very interesting,” she was saying to him. “Classics does seem like a fascinating subject.”  
Lukas nodded, shyly looking down and fiddling with his cuffs. “I like all the reading,” he said softly. “And the history too.”  
Mathias came closer, holding out his tray.  
“Well, you’ll have a wonderful time at Cambridge, I’m sure,” she replied. “I visited once. The buildings are so beautiful there.”  
Lukas reached out to take a glass and as he did so, Mathias caught his eye. They held each other’s gaze for a few seconds, a look that could have meant anything, and then Lukas broke it off with a half-smile, leaving Mathias to continue his tour around the ballroom and wonder if he had just experienced a moment of flirtation.

...

The chandelier in the dining room had been polished and dusted, its cracked glass pendants replaced with new ones, and it filled the room with a soft light that melted into the corners and smoothed out the less attractive things. It spared the conspicuously new paintjob and the gaps where paintings had been plucked out like teeth from being lit up for observation by cruelly bright electric light. Mathias, weighed down by a tray of soup bowls, cast an impatient glance behind him, gesturing for his fellow waiters to hurry up. They were village boys drafted in to add to the illusion of wealth, with no understanding of the rules of service. Many of them were wearing jackets that did not match their trousers, some had scuffed shoes and others appeared incapable of tying a bow tie. Arthur had given them all a stern rub-down with the clothes brush, but their coats were still specked with dust and fluff. They weren’t proper servants at all, Mathias thought with a faint sense of self-satisfaction. He scanned the length of the table. Lukas, under extreme duress, had been seated between two likely-looking young women while Emil, young enough to be spared such things for the time being, was laughing with a boy about his own age and attracting occasional stern looks from his mother whenever he got too loud.

Mathias placed a bowl of soup in front of each guest as he moved along the table, serving them from their left, as he had been taught at Asterley Hall – another place and, it increasingly seemed, another life. Some murmured a ‘thank you’, others ignored him. He hardly minded either way. It was the job of a servant to deflect any insult with a serene smile and neutral comment, and he was good at it, even if he had sometimes had things said to him that had set his blood rising. He looked up quickly and saw that the other waiters seemed to be faring well enough, remembering how nervous he had been serving at his first dinner party. 

Soon enough, he reached Lukas and his companions. Flustered by all the attention they were paying him, it seemed to Mathias that Lukas was content to let them steer the conversation in whatever direction they chose, occasionally nodding or offering a short answer to a direct question. Looking at him from behind, Mathias was overcome by his beauty, by the way that his sunrise-gold hair just brushed the top of his collar and revealed a tantalising glimpse of his pale neck. He was so delicate, his beautiful hands so elegant as they lay folded on the table. He so desperately wanted Lukas to turn around and smile at him again. He leaned forward to place the bowls on the table and nearly brushed against Lukas and it made his heart rise within him; he caught the heavy, sweet scent of the waxy pomade that all young men used to slick their hair and it he was undone. Oh, Lukas, he thought, my darling Lukas, let me take you away from here. We can go away somewhere – I don’t know where, I’ll find somewhere – and you can read all day if you want, and I’ll learn Latin just for you, and Greek. Just leave all this behind, please. I’m telling you you’re too good and too beautiful for all this. But he had done what was required and, despite the pain in his heart, it was time to move on, to finish his circuit of the table and then, when that was done, to begin to serve the wine.

…

August 1914

There was a strange feeling in the village. Mathias had detected it riding in on the servants’ shared bicycle with a shopping list in his back pocket, and it had only increased as he had left the fields behind and entered the settlement proper. It was something ineffable, something he couldn’t have begun to describe, but it lay draped across the silent houses and it sent a hollow shiver of unease through him. He began to hum a tune, then stopped as the silence seemed to intensify in response to the sound. When he reached the high street, he dismounted and wheeled the bike along it, excruciatingly aware of the crunching whine of the creaky frame against the cobblestones, and his own footsteps. He wished he had a cigarette with him – anything to break the tension and let him feign normality, to himself at least. The sense of foreboding in him tightened and tightened like a thread, and he knew that it must snap any moment – but how? 

He found the shop and left the bike propped up outside, fairly safe in the knowledge that no one was likely to steal it. Once inside, he consulted the list. It was short – just a few items for the servants’ dinner. The shopkeeper looked up as he entered and gave him a look that Mathias might have described as being full of pity. Unnerved by both that and the general atmosphere in the village, he decided to get everything finished as soon as possible, hastily rattling off everything on his list to the shopkeeper, “And four ounces of sherbet pips, please.” This done, he stood idle for a few minutes while all his purchases were put together, and his eyes strayed to the headlines of the newspapers in the rack in front of him. All of them announced the same thing, written in the screaming block capitals reserved for national emergencies. Mathias swallowed and reflexively gripped the counter, nauseous with shock. The thoughts fled from his mind and left only a few facts there for him to confront: it was 4th August 1914, he was eighteen years old, and Britain had just declared war on Germany.

…  
Author’s Note: Hey guys! Thanks to all of you who gave feedback on the last chapter, and I hope you enjoyed this one as well. Some M-rated stuff and angst in the next chapter, I promise!


	3. Love and the Fear of Death

October 1914

“It was very good of you to come down and see us before you headed off to France, lad,” said Arthur, sipping his tea. He gave a restrained smile. “I’m sure the maids liked seeing you in your uniform.” he added.  
Mathias shrugged. “Didn’t have anyone else to visit.” he replied. He lifted his own teacup and looked around the deserted kitchen. The candle on the table cast a glossy shine on the crockery arrayed on the shelves and the metal fittings on the cupboards gleamed and winked in the weak light. He would never have expected to miss the place, but weeks of army training had left him longing for exactly this – somewhere quiet and candlelit, comfortably domestic. His hand shook suddenly and the tea sloshed against the side of the cup. He wasn’t ready to be a soldier. What was he thinking?  
“It was very brave of you to enlist,” Arthur continued. His face became thoughtful. “I may sign up myself, if it lasts,” He sighed. “I’m not married, not too old… I suppose I could.”  
“Maybe we’ll see each other.” Mathias said, summoning up a wan smile.   
“Hm, maybe,” Arthur replied. “Although I doubt it’ll last long. A few months, that’s what they’re all saying. A few months and we’ll have you back here again, safe and sound.”  
Mathias made a non-committal sound. He hadn’t thought at all about what he might do after the war. To do so would only be tempting fate.  
Arthur looked at his watch. “You’re getting the night train, aren’t you? Down to London tonight, then Dover in the morning, was it?”  
Mathias nodded. “Yes, that’s it.”

Arthur stood up. “Well then, lad,” he said briskly, his usual businesslike demeanour returning. “Suppose you’d best be off then – it wouldn’t do for you to be late for your boat.”  
Mathias stood too, slinging his army-issue bag onto his back, his empty water bottle rattling as he pulled the straps tighter. “I’ll say my goodbyes then.” he said, managing an echo of his old smile.  
Arthur extended his hand and Mathias shook it. “We’re all very proud of you here,” he said sincerely. “You’ll be a good soldier. You never gave me a moment’s trouble when you were working here.”  
Mathias swallowed, touched by the compliments. “Thank you, sir.” he replied.  
“There’s no need for all that formality,” Arthur chided him gently. “You should be going now. And good luck, lad. Good luck.”

…

The sun was setting as Mathias crossed the entrance hall, squares of light thrown across the floor through the twelve-paned windows. He paused for a moment to have a last view of the ceiling, webbed as it was with cracks and grimy with mildew. There had been paintings on it once. They had decayed, but beneath the hastily-applied whitewash it was possible to glimpse the ghost of patterning. Walking underneath it, he had often wondered what the lost pictures might have looked like. He sighed and shifted his bag higher on his back. He was leaving for the last time, and he was going to do so through the front door.  
“Are they really sending you over there already?”  
Mathias looked up and there – wonderfully, ethereally – was Lukas, standing at the curve of the staircase, one of his ever-present books in hand. He felt all his repressed dreams and desires rushing back to him at once after his time in the training camp, the forced communality, the puerile jokes and the constant telling people that no, he didn’t have a girl waiting at home. For a moment, he was speechless, then managed to choke out:  
“Yes, yes they are. I’m all trained now. No sense in waiting. They need every man they can get over there.” He felt his cheeks warming up – oh God, please, don’t let me be blushing, he thought frantically.  
Lukas hurried down the last few steps and walked over to him. He smoothed his hair down with a quick, nervous motion and would not look Mathias in the eye.  
“So you’re going tomorrow?” he asked.  
Mathias nodded. “London to Dover, then the boat to France.”  
“Where will you be, exactly?”  
“I don’t know.” Mathias admitted. He had been told the name of the place, but had no idea where it was in relation to anything else. A memory flashed into his mind – the map in the orphanage schoolroom, the British Empire highlighted in pink. India, Ireland, Australia, the chalk dust swirling in the air and the ugly brown ink spluttering from the cheap school dip pens.  
Lukas ran a distracted thumb over the spine of his book. “I’ll be going up to Cambridge in three days,” he said. “I hear a good few students have signed up as officers.”  
Mathias shrugged. “There’s boys as have been killed already,” he replied. “The army need replacements.”  
“Well,” said Lukas. “I hear it’ll be over by Christmas. A skirmish, the papers are saying. A few hundred dead on each side and they’ll all realise how silly they’ve been and it’ll all be over, one way or another.

They were silent for a few moments. Mathias was seized, suddenly, by a profound fear that he might be one of the ‘few hundred’, and wondered who would care if he was. And what if it was not a ‘few hundred’ but thousands upon thousands? He wished he had the confidence, or the self-delusion, of the men making such predictions in the newspapers.  
“I’m scared,” he told Lukas. “I might be killed. I could be dead in a week.” His hands began to shake again. He imagined them clamped around a rifle. They had dismantled them at training camp, dissected them like cadavers and put them back together. Trigger, muzzle, breech… He knew the parts now, could name them as easily as a doctor named the parts of the body.  
Lukas stood awkwardly, his free hand stuffed into his pocket. Uncomfortable with emotion, he seemed to be thinking of something to say. “I know.” he eventually muttered – not surly, but with resignation.  
Mathias looked at him and realised that it might be the last time they would ever see each other, that he might die without his feelings ever being made known. For a long moment, he agonised over what to do. He could ask, but he might well be refused. But what did he have to lose? If Lukas said no, if he was shocked or disgusted, then Mathias could simply run off through that door and never look back. And if not, well…  
“Lukas.” he said, using his name for the first time and finding that it rang beautifully.  
Lukas looked up, his eyes full of something unreadable – apprehension, perhaps, or maybe hope.  
“Lukas,” Mathias said again. “Will you let me kiss you? Just once, just before I go?”  
Lukas took a deep breath and bit down on his bottom lip. “Yes.” he said simply.

And so Mathias pulled Lukas closer to him and kissed him with all the full force of all his months of longing – deeply, desperately, incautiously. He was beyond caring about what people thought now. Lukas let his book fall to the floor and it landed spine-first, flashing its white heart for a moment and then lying closed. They kissed with the reckless ardour of people who did not know if they would ever see each other again, and when they broke apart and Lukas stared up at him as if surprised at himself for having done something like that, Mathias took his face in his hands and kissed him again.  
“I wish I didn’t have to go.” he murmured next to Lukas’s ear, reaching for his hand and twining their fingers together.  
“Do you have to leave tonight?” Lukas asked, and Mathias forgot all about his night train. He’d get the first one in the morning; he’d stay here until then.  
“No.” he said.  
Lukas breathed in, a drawn-out sound with a hitch in it that set Mathias alight. “Do you want…” Lukas began hesitantly, then stopped and started again. “Do you want to come up? Upstairs, I mean. To my bedroom.”  
“I do. Yes. Yes, I will. Yes.” Mathias babbled, overcome. His young man’s blood leapt and flamed and he felt the heat rising in him. This was it. This was what he wanted.

…

The floor was littered with clothes – Mathias’s uniform jacket, supposed to his pride and joy, was thrown carelessly with its sleeves pulled inside-out – and a half-packed suitcase lay there awaiting Lukas’s departure. Lukas pulled the bed curtains around them and they were bathed in red light, the darkness of the shadows like the hidden parts of a flower. It was new to Mathias, an exciting novelty – the first time he had ever slept in a four-poster. It was not yet late, but Emil was back at school and Mrs Bondevik always went to bed early. They would not be discovered. And yet Mathias still felt like there was something missing. He could not have said what it was – perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t really anything at all. But he felt its lack nonetheless, for some reason.

He was getting what he wanted, wasn’t he? Yes, surely, the answer should be yes as he and Lukas moved together, kissing and crying out each other’s names. And yet it was not what he had dreamed it might be. There was something wrong or, as he had thought, something missing. They were not attuned to one another. They did not move seamlessly; they jarred, they did not quite match. There was nothing to fix him, nothing to loosen the knot of anxiety in his stomach that hardened and tightened to disappointment as the time wore on. He wondered, maybe, if he had not wanted this sex at all. Sex – a sharp, unpleasant word, the narrow vowel shoved between the two angrily hissing consonants, a word that still had a touch of the clinical about it, the dispassionate. No, no, he thought helplessly. He kissed Lukas all over, because it was what one did, and what he had done before, with his gardener, but inside he was terrified. He had not wanted this… this sex at all. He was in love, damn it. He wanted love, and there was none. There could be none. They couldn’t love each other. They didn’t even know each other. There was nothing beautiful or loving to describe what they were doing as they forced it out of themselves and each other with gritted teeth and hands clasped around wrists. They were both lost. Nothing beautiful, no – no words. Buggery, sodomy, that awful sex word – those were not words of love. 

There was nothing here but lust, as terrifyingly potent as birth or death, and as empty and unsatisfying as a night drinking alone. It was lust driven by fear of a changing world – fear of death, fear of the loss of a young life, fear of the war that showed no signs of abating. Mathias felt as if the world was mocking him, as if some god or another had taken his dream of Lukas and defiled it, so that instead of love and the sublimation of making love, he had nothing but this degradation, this feeling of cheapness and selling himself short. He felt tears boiling in his eyes and angrily blinked them away. It was normal to cry at moments like this, yes, but out of joy, not furious, betrayed disappointment. And he had been betrayed, in the way that all young men in love must be betrayed, and he felt his own foolishness keenly. He and Lukas said nothing to each other apart from the odd, jagged half-words that escaped in the heat of the moment. There were no words, no gestures of tenderness that would have done anything but amplify the miserable awkwardness that existed between them.

It was over soon enough, without any feeling of joy or satisfaction. The moment lingered for a split second, like the smoke left by the last firework in a display, then all was darkness and silence and Lukas blew the candle out. There was no ‘goodnight’, no ‘that was wonderful’, certainly no ‘I love you’. No, the last thing Mathias wanted to hear about was love. He turned onto his side and closed his eyes, feeling the tears trickle out from under the lids. So this was it. This was what he’d waited all those months for, what he’d dreamed of. He lay crying in the darkness like a lost child, feeling ill-used and wishing more than anything that he had got his train. Too late now. He waited for sleep, and for the freedom from thought that it would bring him.

…

When morning came, the sky was thunderous and the colour of ash. Mathias and Lukas woke at around the same time, facing away from each other. They were shy in each other’s presence, shocked by the things that they had been prepared to do and have done to them. Mathias stood up, feeling several different sorts of naked. There was the obvious one, which would have to be remedied by finding his uniform items in the chaos and then somehow flattening out the worst of the creases, but then there was the vulnerability. He felt like he was bleeding from somewhere, such was his emotional rawness. He felt excruciatingly new, as if he had been reborn, and everything felt keen and sharp this morning. He found his shirt and trousers and pulled them on, looking at a neutral point on the floor as he did so. He had a feeling that if he looked Lukas in the eye then something in him would be broken forever. He couldn’t now, anyway, after all that had happened.  
Lukas sat up, his hair tousled and sticky with unwashed pomade. Blearily, he glanced at the bedside clock.  
“You’re not late, are you?” he asked anxiously, watching Mathias’s irritated search for his belt. “I haven’t made you late, have I?” He chewed on a bit of loose skin on his top lip, apparently unwilling to move and let the bedcovers fall from him.   
Mathias shook his head. “No, no, I’ll get the morning train.” he said, finding his belt and fastening it securely. He would, in all probability, be late, but if army training had taught him one thing, it was that nothing ever started on time. ‘Hurry up and wait’, that was the saying.  
“You will write, won’t you?” Lukas continued. “Promise me you’ll write. I won’t know where you are otherwise.”  
And I very much doubt you’ll care, either, Mathias thought bitterly. Lukas would have others – countless others – chasing after him at Cambridge. Like all beautiful boys, he would attract attention wherever he went. “I will.” he said eventually, lying, as he always did, with no compunction.

He picked up his jacket and felt a papery rectangle in his pocket. He knew exactly what it was. Flushed with the excitement of getting his uniform, he’d joined the queue of other young soldiers outside the local photographic studio and got his picture taken. It was the first time he’d ever been photographed. He’d been going to give the picture to Lukas, but now it wasn’t so clear cut. He was angry with both of them, for being lustful boys and plunging straight into – no, not that word again – it, straight into that awful thing, without thinking about it. He didn’t even want to be in the same room as Lukas anymore, the same house, the same country. But yes, he would leave him his picture. Just so Lukas always remembered which one of them had volunteered to fight for his country.  
“I got my photograph taken,” he said, his voice like a small boy’s. “You can have it.” He handed it to Lukas, who took it without looking at him or it. Of course you don’t want to look at it, he thought. Give it a day or two and his picture would be down the back of the bookshelves, accidentally discarded and deliberately forgotten.  
“Are you going now?” Lukas asked, seeing that Mathias was almost ready, just tying his bootlaces.   
“Yes,” Mathias replied bluntly. “I can’t miss this train.”  
Lukas looked away, and Mathias saw a few tears blooming in his eyes. “Goodbye, then,” he said. “And remember to write.”  
“Goodbye.” Mathias said conclusively, opening the door. He looked at the room for a single second, then slipped at out and let the door blow shut behind him with a thud.

He walked through the silent hallways, listening out for the maids. He wanted to leave without being noticed. Running a hand over his chin, he decided that he would have to shave in the station toilets. The sooner he left Lille Skarstind forever, the better. He came to the staircase and looked down at the bowl of the entrance hall that, by some clever trick of the architecture, seemed to bulge and curve slightly like the stern of one of those old wooden ships. Lukas’s dropped book was still lying there on the checked tiles, a forlorn thing, like a bird with a broken wing. He began to walk downstairs, wanting to be out of the house. When he came to the book, he picked it up and read the title on the spine. Pride and Prejudice, it said. Oh, for God’s sake, he thought. When will you ever get tired of all that marriage talk? Marriage. That was what Lukas had to look forward too. Oh, and wouldn’t he just pretend that Mathias had never existed when that happened?

Mathias pulled open the front door and made his defiant exit. He was glad to be gone. The grounds lay silent, apart from those terrible fountains still shooting up to that unpredictable rhythm, and his thoughts echoed louder in his head. Just a bit of rough trade – that was all he was to Lukas. The rich boys liked that, the thrill of being with someone working-class. It was, somehow, a greater transgression than all that hormone-saturated experimentation with other boys at boarding school, and he was sure that Lukas had tried some of that. They liked feeling deliciously sordid, as if the very touch of a working man could carry the heavy masculinity of mines and shipyards and army barracks.   
You never said you loved him, the voice in his head told him.  
Good, because I don’t.  
You could be dead in a week.  
Then I won’t waste any more time thinking about him.

He got both his trains, sitting there with his tears threatening to overspill every time the rickety old engine went over a bump in the track. Anyone looking at him would have seen him for what he was – a frightened boy, unable to admit that he was heartbroken, dressed up in a soldier’s uniform but really far too young for all this business of love and death. He arrived at Dover, falling easily, gratefully back into the calculated thoughtlessness of life in the army, and by the time the soldiers spotted grey coast of France looming out of the leaden sea, he had managed to convince himself that Lukas had never cared about him at all.

…  
Author’s Note: Well, that was pretty intense to write! Quick update is quick because I’ve had this bit of the story in my head for a long time – it’s a bit of a turning point. That was my first M-rated scene (I’d say it was pretty obvious!) so I’m hoping you guys all enjoyed this chapter – the next one’s going to be pretty angsty!


	4. The Fields of France

Author’s Note: Hey guys! Sorry it’s been a little while since the last update – I was busy writing a friend’s birthday oneshot, and I lost my motivation for this a little bit because I wasn’t sure if anyone was actually reading it. But yeah, I got my muse back and I’m quite proud of this chapter! This is about Mathias’s war experiences, so if you’re not comfortable with blood etc, please do tread carefully. Enjoy the chapter!

April 1915

Christmas had come and gone, and the war was still not over. New countries seemed to be entering the fray all the time, dragged in by old alliances or leaping at the chance to exact revenge on a long-standing enemy. Mathias found it impossible to get an overarching sense of the conflict, which was rapidly becoming a world war, from his lowly vantage point in the trenches. Newspapers arrived there sporadically, always days old and crumpled, and he envied the journalists in their London offices, able to take a serenely political view of the war as they typed out orderly accounts of the continuing chaos and casualty lists to be pored over by anxious men looking for boys they went to school with, boys they played football with, boys who once fell to the ground screaming and pretending to be wounded in childhood games of soldiers. They fell forever now, fell in their terrifying multitudes. A single tap of a typewriter key and one dead man became ten, another and he was a hundred, a third tap and the man became a thousand. ‘A few hundred’ indeed, Mathias thought bitterly. And still they died. Married men died. Fathers died. Boys of sixteen died. Mathias had known one of them not even shaving yet, another who wrote to his father asking him to send the cricket scores. Both dead now. There was nothing here but death.

Mathias had read, or been told, that the great booming shells could be heard in Kent, and sometimes further inland. He wondered if they could be heard by the London journalists as they mapped in ink and blood the ebb and flow of the fighting. He wondered if they could be heard in Cambridge, their hollow thumps echoing through the quads and halls of the ancient university. He wondered if Lukas ever thought of him, and if he was ever first in the common room to lay claim to the newspaper with its daily messages of death. What might he feel as he read the casualty lists, scanning them for Mathias’s foreign name among the Smiths and Johnsons and Millers? Maybe he wasn’t even in Cambridge anymore. The universities were emptying, the students enlisting as officers or even just ordinary soldiers. Nonetheless, Lukas didn’t strike him as the sort to want to fight. There was talk of introducing conscription. He’d probably hang on until then. 

Mathias hated himself for thinking about Lukas. After all, he thought, it wasn’t as though Lukas would be thinking about him. He’d got his bit of rough trade, and now he was probably with someone rich and stupid, someone who’d spoil him. But, fool as he was, Mathias couldn’t stop torturing himself with thoughts of how different things could have been. In the moments between waking up and kit inspection, or the silence between attacks of shelling, or by the light of an illicit midnight match, he wrote letters – or, rather, began them. Dear Lukas, he would write, then decide it wasn’t quite the right tone. He would write simply Lukas and then realise that it sounded too blunt, like a telegram. He tried Darling and Sweetheart and My Love and then crossed them all out, furious at his own sentimentality. Once, ludicrously, he began a letter with Dear Mr Bondevik, but the formality was so contrived as to be ridiculous. It was impossible to return to social conventions after all they had done. At any rate, all the worry about forms of address hardly mattered. He never got further than that. What was there to say? We are dying here, helpless as flies stuck on paper, and I am waiting to die myself. He finished his Iliad and gave it to another man, traded it for a packet of cigarettes. It wasn’t half as good as Dorian Gray.

...

Sometimes, if they were lucky and it was quiet, the men were given leave to go into the nearby village a mile or so behind the lines. It was one of those quintessentially French places, the buildings all ochre-coloured with elaborate ironwork around the windows and the smell of fresh bread and pastries unspooling from the open doors of the boulangerie and patisserie. It was calm there, the inhabitants apparently determined to carry on with their lives as normally as possible, but Mathias saw their fear when the shellfire rang out in the distance – saw it in the tightening of hands round shopping baskets and the sudden silence of children stopping their nursery rhymes halfway through a verse. At any rate, it was rare for the soldiers to visit during the day. They came at night, mostly. None of them were particularly interested in the croissants and pains au chocolat in the windows of the patisserie, and nor did they stop to admire the small village square with the crocuses just beginning to bloom in the springtime air. No, they came for the cheap, acidic wine and the chance of some comfort from the village girls.

This particular evening was no different. Mathias had cultivated a small group of friends, men he liked well enough, and they would strike out together of an evening to go drinking. The bar was riotous, full to the rafters with English and French soldiers, shouting and smoking, holding up their empty jugs and demanding, with various degrees of fluency and success, that they be refilled immediately. Patriotism was not a valid currency, and the soldiers were charged as much as any customers – more, if they couldn’t speak French. There was a small group of surly regulars, now forced into a distant corner of the bar, who stared resentfully at the soldiers and blew out irritated clouds of pipe smoke every few minutes, but they were always consciously ignored. Between the tables, wading through the crowds as though they were knee-deep in water, came the girls. A few were particularly popular, others less so, and there were some Mathias never saw more than once, although he hardly paid them any mind. His friends, like most of the soldiers, were half-mad for want of female company, and often made fools of themselves as they flirted and propositioned in French bad enough to be non-existent.  
“Here miss, my friend... my friend... er... mon ami here, he thinks you’re very... very, er, belle? Is that the word? Pretty, I mean.”  
“I’ll buy you a drink, how about that? Wine... tu voudrais du vin?”  
The girls would smile indulgently, patiently going along with the soldiers’ attempts at seduction, then turn to talk and laugh amongst themselves in their own language. Sometimes they gave the soldiers what they wanted, other times not. It always gave the men a good laugh when one of their number was turned down, but tonight Mathias found himself not particularly caring about the outcome. Besides, he had his own interests to pursue.

He stood outside, in one of the pools of amber light that filtered through the old leaded windows, trying to light his cigarette. In his mind lingered the image of a man he had seen killed the previous day, split open with a bayonet. His skin had been very white under its mask of mud, the red leaching out of his cheeks and lips as though all his blood was rushing to the site of the wound. He blinked and saw Lukas, beautiful Lukas, giving him that unreadable half-smile on the night of the party. The images stayed with him, the sacred and the profane. But which was which? The draughty orphanage chapel came back to him, the vicar’s voice putting the fear of God into the children every Sunday. Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood. Surely the dead man had been cleansed of his sins through his sacrifice – that, or there was no justice in all of Heaven and Earth. But then again, what could be more disgusting, more unnatural, than death at the hands of another person? Mathias’s hands were shaking again, and he gave up on his cigarette.

“Vous avez froid?” a voice asked him, a man stepping out of the shadows.  
“English.” Mathias replied. His tongue lay heavy and stupid in his mouth.  
A relieved laugh. “Oh, thank God – so am I! Just thought I’d show my parents they didn’t waste all those school fees after all.” The stranger came up alongside him, distractedly fiddling with the cigarette he had in his mouth, taking it out and then replacing it. He jerked his head in the direction of the bar, from which muffled voices and the occasional shriek of female laughter could be heard. “Tired of the girls?”  
Mathias instantly became more alert. These coded exchanges were what men such as him used to identify each other. He’d had a good few of them over the last few months – anything to get Lukas out of his head. “Never cared for them in the first place.” he said.  
The man smiled. “I’m the same myself.”  
Mathias nodded in acknowledgement. Every word here was loaded with meaning. “What did you ask me, anyway?”  
“I asked if you were cold.”  
Mathias sighed deeply, sending out a frosty cloud into the sharp night air. Every part of him was numb, an aching fog of fatigue burning behind his eyes. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

…

You couldn’t always tell beforehand if you were going to get a talker or not. Mathias didn’t much care for the talkers, the men who loitered after their assignations, wanting to pour their hearts out to a stranger. Mostly, the men you picked up or were picked up by would leave as soon as it was over, swearing and smoking as they stood up and stretched and raked their fingers through hair that was tousled and sweat-matted from their exertions. Others would be moved to unexpected tenderness once the charged heat had dissipated, wanting a kiss or some other chaste gesture of affection before they went out into the night again. There wasn’t really a ‘type’ that you could say with certainty would turn out to be a talker, but they themselves were the worst sort. They craved more than the sex that was so easy to come by, and would sit on the bed, or in a chair, or lean against a wall if there was nowhere else, and then all the things they had never said would overspill in an awful rush of chaotic feelings. Mathias would listen, and sometimes reply, and wish that they would leave him to his misery.  
“When do you think it’ll all be over?” they would often ask, their stricken faces turned to him as if they expected him to know the answer. They would search him, probe him – “What are you going to do after? What did you do before?” He would tell them, without shame, that he had been a servant. It didn’t matter anymore. There was something unifying in their suffering, the grim camaraderie and the blackest of black humour that they shared to make bearable the days where you saw a smooth-faced boy with his whole torso blasted open by a shell. Society was no longer important in this place without laws and points of reference. They were all rough trade here.

“Did you have anyone at home?” someone once asked him, a young man from Manchester who had already confided that he would wake confused in the night and search the empty horizon for the reassuring bulk of the factory chimneys.  
“Yes,” Mathias replied. “He didn’t care for me. He just wanted a bit of rough trade – you know how these boarding school boys are. I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”   
“I understand,” the young man replied. “There was a nice lad I used to see sometimes, then my mother found out. I ran off to the army first chance I got, see, because she didn’t want any queers dirtying up her house. That’s what she said, at any rate.”  
“I never had a mother.” Mathias said bluntly. They smoked together, then went their separate ways. He wasn’t bad, that one, for a talker. It was only later, in the darkness of the trench and the silence of the sleeping men, that he felt a horrible stab of guilt for talking about Lukas like that. He never loved you. He never loved you, the voice in his head chanted over and over. Never, Mathias told himself, never. And yet that half-smile rose in his mind, and the tremor in Lukas’s voice as he asked him to come upstairs, and the tears that had glimmered at the corners of his eyes as Mathias left. 

Mathias shook his head to clear it. Just for show, all of it. Lukas had seen his chance with him and seized it. He was probably crying because it hurt, or because he was afraid his mother would find out. He probably hadn’t given Mathias another moment’s thought once he’d cleaned himself up and got all packed and ready for Cambridge. Besides, Lukas would never understand what he was feeling now. There was no way to explain the jarring shock of seeing a disembodied hand caught in the barbed wire as though to point the way for those who would follow, and nor was there any way to explain the horrible, surging sickness that had come over him as he had stepped in what seemed like a puddle but was in fact, a body in the first stages of putrefaction, and found that he was ankle-deep in the liquefying organs. There was no way to describe the scourging feeling as he had thrown up every last thing he had ever swallowed, no words for the dryness of his lips and throat after – and worst of all, the dryness of his eyes. There was no way to tell anyone, even his fellow soldiers, the revulsion he had felt after finding himself unable to shed a tear for the poor man. And how would Lukas, labouring through his books and crossing the quads wrapped up in his college scarf, understand the necessity of the mindless comfort the men all sought from the women or each other? What would he know of the underlying urgency to it, the need to feel the quickening in the blood, the hardening, the gathering of all their energy to this one purpose? It was only through this act, common to all animals, that they were able to feel human again, and capable of love, even if the love was empty and hollow and meted out to strangers. He cried then, his face buried in his hands, another sobbing man whose breakdown went unremarked in these days of madness.  
“Lukas,” he whispered through his tears. “Oh, Lukas, if only you could see what’s become of me.”

…

June 1916

The war was slowly advancing through France, the numbers of dead rising with every mad dash ‘over the top’ and every shell launched into No-Man’s-Land. All around, the fields lay violated, stripped to their bare mud, and the only things that broke up the despairing vastness of the view were dead trees and the occasional abandoned farmhouse. No matter where you were, it was the same. But now there was talk of breaking out of the routine. News filtered down to the front lines of Important Decisions being made by the top brass, concerning the Big Push – an assault that would send the Germans scampering all the way back to where they’d come from. Few of the hardened soldiers like Mathias believed all the rhetoric so easily swallowed by the boys and conscripts, but it was impossible to shake off the feeling that things would, indeed, be different this time. 

In advance of the expected battle, Mathias was given a few days’ leave to return to England. After almost two years in France, he wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. Initially, he went to London to visit a friend who’d been invalided out after losing a leg. They sipped tea together and chatted about how things were. The friend had found a job balancing the books for a little tailor’s in Wapping and was walking out with a nice girl who worked in the baker’s across the road. Mathias told him about the planned Big Push, and they agreed that it was unlikely to be as important as the officers were claiming. After that, he went straight to King’s Cross, eschewing all the sightseeing opportunities of the city, and, as though compelled by an invisible force, boarded a train for the place he knew so well. People always seek out what they know, he mused as the countryside flashed by, even if it’s the worst thing for them and the last thing they need.

The bus to Lille Skarstind started off full, then gradually emptied. There were several other soldiers in the uniform of the local regiment – the one he himself had joined – who got off at the various scattered villages along the way, going home to relieved mothers and fathers and siblings, perhaps with a flower plucked from the roadside to give to their sweethearts. Mathias slipped into a sort of trance, thinking of the man he’d killed the month before. It had been hand-to-hand fighting – he had had no choice but to kill him – but the images still rose unbidden to his mind with the solidity of memory rather than the wateriness of imagination. He had stabbed him with his bayonet and felt it pierce... something, he didn’t know what. It was a long time since the training camp and the sawdust dummies they had all mercilessly attacked until they could do it blindfolded. In, twist, out. In, twist, out.  
“Are you alright there?”  
Mathias blinked slowly, surfacing from his memories. The bus had stopped and the engine was silent. There were no other passengers and the driver had turned in his seat to address him. “What?” he asked, disorientated. His mind was still in turmoil.  
“Are you getting off here, lad? This is the last stop.” The driver spoke again, and something in the gentleness in his tone told him that this man was a father. Perhaps his own son was over in France. Perhaps he had already lost him.  
Mathias stood up uncertainty, hauling his bag up from the floor. “Yes, I...” he swallowed and started again. “I wanted to get off here anyway.” Still unsteady, he made his way to the doors at the front of the bus, and the driver looked at him with an expression of concern.  
“You don’t look too well,” he said kindly, putting a hand on Mathias’s shoulder. “You’re as white as a sheet. Tell you what,” he continued. “There’s a lovely tearoom on the corner there. Get yourself something to eat, and the bus’ll be setting off again in an hour, how about that?”  
Mathias nodded. “Thank you.” he mumbled, negotiating the narrow steps down to the ground again.

It was Sunday afternoon, and Mathias was worried he’d see the cook or one of the maids from Lille Skarstind enjoying her time off. He was beginning to realise that coming here had been a mistake. What was he planning to do? Go up to the house again? But he had had nowhere else to go. Asterley Hall was like a mirage to him now, and there was nowhere he could go that held even a moment’s worth of happy memories. Better here than in France, he supposed.

At any rate, there probably wouldn’t even be anyone at Lille Skarstind. Conscription had been in place for four months. Lukas, a student, would have been one of the first to go – he was barely twenty years old, and hardly in essential employment. Then Arthur, a little older but childless, unmarried and, again, not in essential employment. Emil, newly eighteen, would be going too, but it was Mathias’s understanding that the young ones wouldn’t be formally called up for a few months yet. His uniform conferred some benefits in the civilian environment of the teashop. He was served before people who had been waiting longer than him, and the waitress offered to bring him a newspaper. 

It was a nice treat to sit with a cup of sugary tea and a cream bun, and Mathias found the tight knot of anger and fear, his constant battlefield companion, loosen in him a little. The waitress brought his paper and, almost reflexively, he found himself turning to the casualty list. Since conscription had come in, he had found himself searching for Lukas and Arthur every day. King, Kingsley, Kingsman... Mathias scanned the list. No Kirklands today. So Arthur was safe, for the time being. He took a bite of his bun and flicked his eyes back to the ‘B’s. Boling, Bolton, Bond, Bonner... No Bondeviks today either. All at once, Mathias felt a sickness rising in him. All these names that he had flicked through in his search for Lukas – all of them belonged to real people, men his age and younger boys. What right did he have to be cherry-picking from the list? What made Lukas, who had never concerned himself with Mathias anyway, any more worthy of his notices than the other names printed there? What made Lukas more important than, say, George Pilling, or Daniel Painter, or any of the names he could have pulled from the three narrow columns? He had killed men, several men. He had never known their names, and there was no guarantee that anyone else had either. A terror seized him, a conviction that, somewhere, the men whose blood he had sponged out of his uniform were lying unidentifiable in graves with numbers rather than names.

Not wanting to appear too frantic, he stood up and made his way to the small toilet at the back of the building. It was mercifully empty, and as he looked at himself in the mirror over the sink, he found it impossible to meet his own eyes. There was something dead in them, as though all the death he had seen and caused was collecting in them. And yet he himself had not yet sustained so much as a scratch. More memories flashed in his mind, obscuring his reflection. Shell-holes deep enough to drown in. Rats, slick with mud, slithering over him at night. A man with his entire lower jaw shot away, a friend trying to pour a few drops of water into his open throat and panicking because he simply couldn’t angle the bottle correctly. Again, he felt the scourging sickness. The sugar from his bun coated his mouth, thick and cloying, and it all came rushing out of him again. The door opened and an older man stepped in. He caught sight of Mathias, still coughing and gasping, swilling his mouth out and splashing water on his face, then gave him a fleeting look, looked away again and left the room. So this was how it would be in the future, Mathias thought – praising the soldiers for their bravery and sacrifice, then choosing to look away from their suffering.

When the bus came, he rode it all the way back into town, then rented a room for a few days and waited to go back to the fighting.

...

August 1916

The promised battle had come, and come with a vengeance. Even here, several miles behind the lines and safely out of harm’s way, the shells and shots continued to crack and boom with the continuousness of a pulse. Or not. A pulse was a fragile thing, as Mathias had learnt over the past few days. It was like a fraying thread, and the instant it snapped, there was nothing that could be done to repair it. Mathias shifted position slightly, moving more on to his back than his side to lessen the pain. Someone at the other end of the ward began to cry out, words lost in the screams. There was a sympathetic bolt of pain from his own wound, and he let his fingers trail gently over the stitches. He had been unbelievably lucky to survive, and as the throbbing began to subside, his mind drifted back over recent events.

It had taken him a few moments to realise he had been shot, as if he was a toddler just beginning to walk, unsure of why he had fallen. He had brushed it off as having simply tripped in the pitted ground, and it was not until he had begun to stand up that he had seen the blood beginning to seep out onto his uniform. He had looked at it in confusion, a numb sense of shock freezing his mind. Here was the blood, but where was the pain? He was certainly bleeding an awful lot. Reflexively, he had pressed his hands to the wound in his abdomen and watched in horror as the blood continued to spurt out through his fingers. There had been a taste of metal in his mouth, and when he had opened it, more blood had splashed out. At that moment, the pain had hit him, set him gasping and sent tears springing from his eyes.

The hospital was calm after the chaos of the casualty clearing station. He didn’t remember much of the terrifying few hours he’d spent there, hovering between life and death, surrounded by screaming men. He might have cried out himself at some point, they thought. They had put someone else’s blood into him, because he had had so little of his own left – a transfusion, the nurse had explained. They had taken him to be operated on, to have the bullet extracted and him stitched up, inside and out. “Pretend you’re just having a tooth out.” the surgeon had said to him, covering his mouth and nose with the chloroform mask. He was lucky, he knew that much. There weren’t many men who survived a wound like his.

There was a nurse moving through the ward, stopping at each bed to give the man in it a small piece of card. Mathias sat up and watched in confusion. What was going on? Were they being sent home? He hoped not. The last thing he wanted to do was go to England – and, in his condition, a stormy journey across the Channel wasn’t going to do him any favours. When the nurse reached his bed, she handed him one of the cards, and he scanned it anxiously. It was a notification of injury card. There was a space for a name, an address and a signature – the rest was pre-printed, except where you had to tick whether your wound was ‘slight’ or ‘serious’, whatever that meant. But who would he send it to? He imagined addressing it to Lukas and, in his mind’s eye, saw him picking up and – what? How would Lukas react if he knew Mathias was injured? If he knew that he was the person he had chosen to tell? But Lukas would be in the army by now – maybe wounded, maybe dead. Mathias bit down on his bottom lip to steady it. It was high time he gave up on this silly infatuation. Lukas had never loved him, never would, and most probably didn’t care tuppence either way for his welfare. With a sinking heart, Mathias handed the card back to the nurse and told her he had no one at home.


	5. A Reunion

Author’s Note: Hey guys! I know it’s been forever and I’m really sorry – I’ve been on holiday for the last three weeks, so my computer time has been very limited, and both my inspiration and my confidence have taken a nosedive in the last few days, so it was hard to write through that. Anyway, I’m back, and I hope you enjoy the new chapter!  
…  
June 1920

Mathias watched the water run through the crevices of his hands, watched how it welled up clear in them and then spilled out clouded by dust. He turned them over and let the stream run over the backs of them, carving out a path through the dirt. Blink and the water would become blood, thick and drying in the lines of his palms. Blink a second time and it would be pure again, flowing cleanly into the sink below. Out damned spot. He remembered the terror of being called upon to read in lessons, the Complete Shakespeare sitting ominously on the teacher’s desk. Wash the blood out. Ah, if only he could. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block out the memories before they had a chance to appear.  
A hammering at the bathroom door. “You nearly finished in there?”  
Mathias jumped at the sudden sound, tensing as though it was rifle fire. He turned off the tap and straightened up, irritated by the interruption. “Give me a fucking minute!” he shouted through the door, drying his hands on the ragged towel hanging on a nail by the sink. He was angry all the time now. War had changed him. It had aged him in the thinning of his face, the dousing of his smiles, the way his spine tightened to military precision and then bent as though broken when it was all over. It had snatched the last of his boyhood from him; a cruel trick, a rug pulled from under his feet. After the violence, horrifically normal, it was easy – too easy – to find one’s hand curling into a fist at the slightest provocation. For four years, he had been told to shoot first and ask questions later. Now that the war was over, he and all the other former soldiers were expected to drop the military act and return to normal life. As if it really was just a mask. As if it really was possible to forget all that they had seen and done, all they had known of the darkness in men’s hearts. The unacknowledged urges still beat within them, and they had to tamp them down further and harder than ever before. Life went on, but it seemed increasingly as if no longer included them – as if society was tired of waiting for them to keep up.

Mathias pushed open the door and walked past the waiting man, ignoring his exaggerated sigh. He gritted his teeth against the urge to hit him in the face. Enough of this violence. Breathe. Just breathe, and think of something else, something better. Not of blood and screaming, and not of a house that stood on a hill. Not of music and champagne flutes, and not of dark blue eyes and a bed with red velvet curtains. The war was over. He was his own man now, and he would not think of Lille Skarstind. And yet it was only ten miles away, an easy trip on his new bicycle. Again and again, he was compelled to come here, the only place that held any sort of meaning for him. He was living in the county town now, in a boarding house for unmarried men. There weren’t a great many of them, what with all that had happened. The pressure was on those who had survived to marry, to rescue a girl from spinsterhood. There weren’t enough men to go around, and any man who hadn’t yet got down to the all-important business of choosing a girl to make an honest woman out of and producing the next generation was viewed with disapproval. 

The unmarried crowd were, by and large, damaged. There were the men who had been disfigured by their wounds, left unable to crack a smile, let alone talk or flirt. There were those destroyed by the poison gas, plagued by coughing and shaking, spilling their drinks and dropping their forks before they could take a mouthful of anything. There were those who, despite being superficially undamaged, lived in a tormented version of reality. They were the men who saw death in everything, whose minds were too weak or memories too strong to suppress what they had experienced – too far gone, too much given over to thoughts of what they had seen to pay any mind to the future, or even the present. And there was a fourth category – men too deeply warped to be changed by anything, whose lack of interest in women was embedded in their nature. The queers, the benders, the fairies. Himself. Lukas. Unless, of course, Lukas had simply sold out and married the first rich girl who came along. He’d have to, at some point. He was the wrong side of twenty-one, and admirers who’d spoil and cherish him would be thin on the ground by now. Unless, of course, he was dead. Mathias wondered if Lille Skarstind was still standing. Every week, another house went. You saw it in the newspapers – the heir dead at eighteen, the title extinct, the house crumbling. Hasten the end. Demolish it. Salt the earth like the soil of Carthage, so that the land would be forever barren. Good Classical reference there, Mathias thought. Wouldn’t Lukas be proud?

…

Strawberry pickers required for the summer months. 12 hours daily, paid by the pound. Accommodation provided. All enquiries and applications to be made to Hillbank Farm, outside Greyfleet.  
Vacancy available for a permanent hand on Lake Farm, £20 per annum, food and lodgings included. Apply in person – men accustomed to farm labour or other physical occupations preferred.  
Experienced welders needed at Johnson’s Ironworks, adjacent to the Strandport shipyard. Wages dependent on level of experience. Applications close 15th July.

Mathias scanned the noticeboard, hoping to find something more appetising than the hot, grimy darkness of the ironworks or the pain and boredom of spending twelve hours a day bent over in the fields. Each morning, the men in the boarding house clustered around the vacancies put up in the entrance hall, all looking for a job, the means to launch themselves out of the strange limbo in which they had found themselves. Mathias himself was a stonemason when he could find the work and a labourer when he couldn’t. A labourer. His first lie to Arthur, the first time he’d whitewashed his past. Oh, to be back at Asterley Hall. He longed for the shapes of things – the scrolled edges of the silverware, the precise rectangle of the tablecloth, the pristine folds of his pocket handkerchief. Now he came home exhausted each evening, his hands coated with dirt and his clothes striped with the dust of his occupation. He was real rough trade now.  
“See anything you fancy?” his friend Gilbert asked, himself absorbed in the scraps pinned to the board.   
“Can’t say I do.” Mathias replied absently, continuing his search. He wanted to use his skills, gained during a hasty apprenticeship the previous year. The country had haemorrhaged skilled workers all through the war, and it was up to near-amateurs like him, with their rudimentary training, to fill the gap.

Gilbert had become a good friend since their meeting here just after the war, during those strange days that dripped out until the slow end of 1918. He was of Prussian extraction but kept that quiet. “I’m Gilbert Beilschmidt,” he had said by way of introduction. “Only I’m not. Lance-Corporal Bell, at your service. Safer that way, don’t you think?” As he had explained to Mathias one evening, the fact that he had been raised in England and fought in the British Army meant nothing to some people. The name change, though it grated on his forbidden Prussian patriotism, was vital for his safety. He often spoke fondly of his younger brother, Ludwig, who had been made a sergeant and earned a Military Cross for his achievements. “You see,” Gilbert had said to him one evening while not entirely sober. “Gilbert – now that’s a common enough name. Plenty of little Gilberts running around back when I was a lad. You shout ‘Gilbert’ in our street and three of us look up to ask what’s the fuss. But Ludwig – now that’s where it gets tricky. Lud can’t be short for much else except Ludlow, and who’s going to believe that? Then there’s Louis, but that’s a bit too French, you know – a bit soppy. But we got there eventually. So if you ever hear of a Lewis Bell, that’s my brother.”

Gilbert’s voice jolted him out of his recollections. “Here, what about this?” he suggested, pointing to a small notice that was new that morning, judging by the fact that it had been pinned directly on top of several older announcements.  
“What’s it saying?” Mathias asked, his eyes skimming the advertisement for details of pay.  
“Well, let’s have a look now… Restoration job – tarting up some old place for sale, I’m guessing,” Gilbert commented. “Furniture makers wanted, plasterers, gardeners – I could do some of that. Oh, and masons too. Got any experience with statues?”  
Mathias’s heart stopped, then raced. Restoration job. Old place. “Where, exactly?” he asked, a sudden thickness in his throat.  
Gilbert’s eyes flicked down the page to the address. “Lille Skarstind,” he said with an air of disapproval. “Bloody ridiculous name, if you ask me.”  
“It’s a mountain,” said Mathias, his voice weak. “A mountain in Norway.”

…

Mathias had not laid eyes on Lille Skarstind for almost six years, and as he and Gilbert neared the top of the hill, he was seized with an irrational fear of what was about to happen. Lukas would be there – Lukas, whom he hadn’t seen since leaving the house, whose image in his mind had been almost obliterated, crowded out by darker, bloodier things. He lit a cigarette and sucked on it furiously, dragging every last bit of smoke out of it and trying to calm his shaking hands. He had seen men literally turned to vapour by the detonation of a mine. He had looked into the eyes of another man, then stabbed him with his bayonet. Sleepless one early morning, he had seen a firing squad marching on their way to carry out a death sentence. And yet, for all he fancied himself strong, all it took was the prospect of meeting Lukas again to make him lose his nerve. The smoke burnt his throat, and he coughed, sending a stab of pain through his old scar. Suddenly, absurdly, he wanted to laugh. You’ve killed more men than you know, he told himself, and yet you can’t face meeting the one you once made cry.  
Gilbert had noticed his agitation. “You alright there?” he asked, concern on his face.  
The sun rising behind clouds. Sheets thrown back, his skin sticky with sweat. A train missed for the sake of dark blue eyes, a desperate kiss and a proposition he should never have accepted. “Yes,” he replied, a thousand miles away. “Just a little tired.”

He was unprepared for the sight of Lille Skarstind. Reaching the top of the hill, he and Gilbert stopped to catch their breath after the climb, and Mathias raised his eyes to look upon the house that had changed more than he could ever have imagined. Six years was a long time, but in his memory it was a single blur of blood and shouting, drinking and loveless sex and the great, abiding emptiness in him – the longing, the frustration. Six years was nothing. It was his whole life. It was a moment. It was forever. Here, now, in front of the house he had never thought to see again, it vanished, and Mathias felt as if he had never been away. And yet the house itself bore the marks to show that his absence had lasted not moments but years. The fountains, with their awful, shuddering, unpredictable rhythm, were silent. The water lay thick and stagnant in them, striped with weeds and moss. From the once-regimented beds and borders, trees and flowers overspilled, tangled up with thorns and nettles, and the topiary hedges had disappeared into their own rampant growth. The state of the house itself didn’t bear thinking about, and Mathias felt a stab of unexpected sadness on seeing it. Windows gaped, showing the despairing darkness behind them. Tiles were missing from the roof, and the statues mounted on either side of the front door were meshed in ivy, their faces dissolving from years of rain and neglect. It was a near-ruin, close to uninhabitable and closer to demolition.  
“Bloody hell,” said Gilbert with a whistle. “That’s a job and a half.”  
Mathias nodded absently, dazed by the sight in front of him. His eyes sought out his small attic room, where he had read his Iliad and revisited his favourite scenes from Dorian Gray. It was the place where he had looked at his treasured postcards and dreamed of Lukas, imagining the touch of those delicate hands, the taste of those beautiful lips, the sound of that soft voice crying out to him, forming his name, his praises. Mathias felt his face heat up at the memory. Even now, after his great disillusionment, the thought of his old hope could still send frissons through him. But that time was long gone, and six horrendous years separated him from the eighteen-year-old boy who had first knocked on the back door of Lille Skarstind. He looked on his younger self as if the two of them weren’t the same person at all – as if he had not simply become a man, but become someone else entirely. In his mind’s eye, the boy he had been turned his face to him, as helpless as a young conscript, and looked as him as if he was afraid of the man the war would make him. “It’s certainly worse than some,” he managed to reply at last. “Must have been the war. The owner’s probably living in one room.”  
Gilbert shrugged. “Maybe so,” He reached into his pocket, searching for a cigarette. “God,” he said, casting his eyes over the front of the house. “I could probably afford this place myself.”

…

Mathias laid his bag of tools on the ground, hearing the heavy clinking as they jolted around inside. Taking a step back, he began to inspect the statue, assessing what needed to be done. This one wasn’t too bad – all it seemed to need was to have the roughness of time scraped away. He enjoyed jobs like this. Like a reassuring hand, he worked to smooth back the years from the carved faces and restore them to their former perfection. And yet, with every face he brought back from its decay, those awful, destroyed faces would rise in his mind, clamouring for his attention. He had seen men with missing lower jaws, men with a whole side of their face crumpled in on itself, burnt skin like dripped and cooled wax. They reminded him, horribly, of Dorian Gray’s portrait, and he couldn’t help but extend the metaphor and wonder, in his darkest moments, exactly whose sins they were suffering for. His own? But what had he done? It was a long list. He had killed several men, and left others to die. He had survived with only a single scar. He had survived, and for some men that was guilt enough. But what had he done before? He had left Lukas alone and crying. He had never sent a single promised letter. Gently, he touched the statue’s pitted cheek, and, in the heat of the sun, it was warm with the warmth of human skin. Skin ripped from flesh and bones. Blood everywhere – a lake of it, an ocean. Repulsive. Repulsive.

Mathias ran a despairing hand through his hair. These emotional oscillations were too much for him to bear in his traumatised state. One moment he was smiling, sharing a beer with Gilbert and playfully betting his small change at cards, while the next he was crying into the sleepless dark and feeling the stickiness of blood on his hands, the hot spray of it on his face, a mist coating his lips and cheeks and eyelids. Then there was Lukas. Most of the time Mathias could do his best to hate him, even if he could never forget him, and convince himself that Lukas had taken advantage of him, and most of the time he could successfully reduce Lukas to an unpalatable memory, another faceless one-nighter who meant nothing more to him than any of the soldiers he had been with, nor anyone else he had had afterwards. But there were other times – his more vulnerable moments – when he would miss Lukas with every fibre of his being. The very stones cry out. He’d heard that somewhere – he wasn’t sure where, but it had a biblical ring to it. From behind its mask of cracks, the carved smile of the statue taunted him. The very stones cry out. That was what he felt like, in the depths of his misery, when he found himself wishing like he had never wished before that he and Lukas had done things properly, and that the war had not interposed and forced them both into an impossible position – to consummate their budding relationship before either of them was ready, or to wait and risk never consummating it at all. Oh, you were so young, he thought to himself. So young – freshly shaved, dressed in a uniform stiff with its newness, and cleaner than he’d feel or be for another four years. 

And now he was about to see Lukas again. He was tense, feeling as though things were being moved around behind the scenes in preparation for the inevitable encounter. It would happen, he knew that much. He could feel it, that deep conviction, that superstitious certainty. Now that the workers had all been detailed off by the foreman, Lukas would have to come out at some point and observe how things were going. He was dizzy with nerves. It was that old feeling he’d got waiting to go over the top, listening to the crack and thump of the bullets and shells and wondering if it would be him this time. Now he was similarly terrified. It was the not knowing that got to him – the impossibility of guessing or hoping what was going to happen. God, he didn’t even know what he wanted to happen. A hundred permutations of the situation, a thousand, flickered through his tortured mind. What would Lukas say? Anything? Would he just retreat into that weighted silence of his and pretend not to know or remember him? Mathias felt his stomach twisting, a deep and unpleasant motion that sent its coils all through his body. This lust, this infatuation, would be the death of him. It was all his own fault, really for getting above himself. Poor as he was, Lukas was still cut from a rather different cloth from Mathias, and the mixing of upstairs and downstairs could never do anyone any good. Oh, but how could he have resisted? The night came back to him – the setting sun through the windows of the hall, and Lukas on the turn of the stairs, and that hitch in his voice that, for Mathias, had not only removed his doubts but made him forget entirely the possibility of refusing. His thoughts swirled and darted, confused, and he could not hold on to any of them for long enough. He had made a terrible mistake. He had been wrong to want or hope for more than what he’d got with his soldiers. Love. What good had that ever done him? What evidence had he seen of it in the trenches? If only he had written. If only he had, somehow, been able to rationalise his disordered emotions into words on the page. He closed his eyes, trying to calm the fury in his mind. He felt like he was waiting for his execution. And then…

“I thought you were dead.”  
Mathias turned, electrified by the shock of the sound of Lukas’s voice, a voice from his past that he had so often heard whispering in his heart in the silence between shots. He saw Lukas standing there, saw him step back in shock. He ran his eyes over him, remembering the precise sweep and fall of his hair, the eyes that glinted from out of their own darkness, the pale skin beginning to redden from the surprise of seeing him. The sight of him hit Mathias like a physical force, the jolt of recognising someone after a long absence. The Lukas he remembered was an eighteen-year-old boy, but the man who stood before him had changed since then. He had lost the boyish softness to his features and skin and, however belatedly, had grown his last inch or two. There was a difference to the way he carried himself too – he stood straight out of defiance rather than natural confidence, as if he had suffered a blow at some point, and there was a sort of restrained sadness in him as he looked at Mathias from a tactful distance. All at once, the memory – the abstraction – of Lukas, flowed away into the blackness of the war and the past, and before him Mathias saw the reality. And despite how stupidly self-evident and hopelessly inarticulate it was, all he was able to say was, “I’m not dead.”  
Lukas made a sound like a sort of despairing laugh, facing this unbelievable yet undeniable truth. “How was I supposed to know that,” he asked. “When you never wrote to me?”  
“I couldn’t.” Mathias replied, strangely ashamed. He should be taking the defensive, he thought, and instead he was crumbling.  
Lukas sighed, exasperated. “A word!” he said in a voice tight with frustration. “A word, Mathias. A word and an address – that’s all you would have had to send. That’s all I would have needed, so I’d know where you were.”  
“What did you want me to say?” Mathias protested. “You know how it was over there. You must know, if you went.”  
Lukas blinked, and for a moment his face was vulnerable. “Of course I went,” he said hastily. “Of course I saw. It was impossible not to go,” He shook his head. “I just can’t believe you’re still alive,” He looked up at Mathias. “You promised you’d write. You promised.”  
“You would have seen me in the casualty lists if I’d been killed.” Mathias reminded him, taking refuge in the facts of their shared war experience.  
Lukas crossed his arms. “Not if they didn’t find your body. Not if they didn’t find your nametags,” He sighed. “Mr Kirkland, for example, went ‘missing’ on the first day of the Somme, according to the telegram. I understood that to mean they never found his body. Since it has been four years with neither him nor any part of him returning home, I believe that assumption was correct.” His speech was stiff and nervous, his eyes firmly on the ground.   
Mathias was horrified. Arthur was dead. Arthur, who, though not exactly a father figure, had always been so kind to him in the few short months they had known each other. “That’s awful.” he said weakly.  
Lukas nodded grimly. “It is,” he replied. “And I thought the same had happened to you. The truth of it is, by the time the war ended, I had already mourned you.”

With that, Lukas turned away from Mathias with a decisive motion and slipped back into the decaying darkness of the house. Mathias stood and watched him go, his work forgotten and his thoughts confused by the fact that Lukas, his love for whom he had suppressed by imagining he had never cared for him, had once cried over his supposed death.


	6. Becoming the Darkness

Author’s Note: Hey everyone! Sorry about the wait (again). I’ve had a crazy few weeks, with getting my GCSE results and getting ready to start my new 6th form and everything (I start tomorrow – help!) so it’s been hard to get a good sustained go at finishing this chapter, but it’s finished now! On a side note, I went to the WW1 exhibition at the Imperial War Museum the other day – it was absolutely brilliant and gave me a few ideas for the direction the story will take. If you live in or will be visiting London or the surrounding areas, I highly recommend it.

…

The pub was full of smoke and male voices – rough voices, heavy with the local accent and coarse with lack of refinement. It was more crowded than usual, heaving with the influx of summer workers who had come to lend the strength of their bodies for a few months, and the occasional inflection that spoke of the Lake District or West Country could be heard jarring the rhythm of the village speech as voices rose in jest or argument. Mathias knew that, come autumn, there would be even more workers as the harvest began. He knew that, but he had never witnessed it. He had never spent an autumn at Lille Skarstind – by September 1914, he’d been in an army training camp, and by October he’d been in a trench. 

He remembered that first night – the career soldiers, already jaded, looking on the recruits with pity; the shock of the cold mud and endless damp; the pure terror of hearing the first volley of shells. In time, they’d all learnt to distinguish them all by learning to recognise the noise each one made, but at the time all the ammunition had been one shrieking, uniform, terrifying mass. And yet, now that he thought about it, on that first night in the trenches he had been too numb to really feel anything. He had been numb, yes, but just below that numbness had been the scalding vulnerability of laying himself and his heart open to Lukas – Lukas, the one he’d spent six years trying to reduce to a memory and a mistake. But after today, he could fool himself no longer.

“Mathias!” Gilbert, laughing, waved a hand in front of his face, and Mathias found himself jerked out of his trance.  
“What?” he asked, for once irritated to be pulled out of his memories, no matter how dark they were.  
Gilbert, oblivious, nudged him and pointed to his untouched beer. “You finishing that?”  
Mathias shook his head and pushed it towards him. “You have it.” he replied, for once having no desire to get drunk. Though a necessary anaesthetic to blunt the knife of his thoughts, for him the taste of alcohol would forever be associated with nights in the trenches, nights spent drinking away the fear of the coming morning’s attack. He still drank, because he hardly knew what else to do with his spare time, but ever since the Somme the liquid had slithered down his throat like a dead thing, cold and disgusting. It turned his stomach, but the alternative was to always be as he was now – horribly, excruciatingly self-aware. He clenched his fists under the table and forced himself to look up, to focus on the conversation. The day’s encounter with Lukas hovered just below the level of his consciousness, demanding to be examined, but he shoved it away for the moment. There would be time enough – indeed, his whole life – for regrets.

Gilbert was talking to a few of the other labourers from Lille Skarstind, discussing some inane point of contention in the previous Saturday’s football match. There was something strange in all of their mannerisms, something that Mathias had observed since his return from the war. They all seemed a little too involved in the conversation – they all talked a little too loudly and argued their corner a little too passionately and their laughter, when there was cause for laughter, went on just a second or so too long and had an edge of madness to it. It was as though, with the darkness of their stolen youth moving in all of their minds, they were determined to reassert their status as young men who did the things all young men did. But never would such things come quite naturally to them, and never would they be able to forget the inherent deceit that lay at the heart of this pretence, this artificial carelessness. It was a fabricated youth, to replicate what they had been denied, and they all knew it. It was a lie, and a lie that they all told themselves, their wives and their children, and it was a lie they told over and over again. For some it became the truth; for others it became intolerable.

Mathias found his mind drifting towards thoughts of Arthur. It had been a shock to find out about his death like that, and even more so because it was not officially a death at all but the dreaded ‘missing in action’. Those three words were the cruellest, with their tiny spark of hope that convinced desperate mothers that their sons must still be alive somewhere, in a hospital or prison camp or with his name and location simply lost in the chaos of post-battle paperwork. Even now, two years later, there were those who believed that their sons would come stumbling out of a wood in France or Belgium, shell-shocked and dressed in rags, but alive. He remembered the Somme well – it was the battle where he had been injured, a horrendous uphill attack that had gone on for months. It was such an awful place to be lost, and he felt a profound sadness at the thought that he would never know precisely where Arthur had been buried.

He had never really known Arthur at all, he reflected. The impression he had got was that Arthur was rather like all butlers – mannered, discreet and very much preoccupied with maintaining the balance of the household. He had never been anything but kind to him, but Mathias knew nothing about his family or background. A butler tended to work in one house for his entire career, and as he reflected on this fact it occurred to him that Lukas and Emil must have been close to him – he would have worked there when they were children, and possibly before. Mathias remembered one evening in particular, when he had walked into the same room as he was. He had seen him running a distracted hand through his hair, and in among the ash-blond strands he had glimpsed the duller glint of grey beginning to show through. The sight had moved him, in a strange way – it had been a sign of Arthur’s departing youth, and almost piercingly intimate. Mathias had had to look away from him and slip from the room before being noticed. It had been a reminder that butlers did not generally have private lives, and that Arthur would have to mark the passage of the years alone.

Mathias looked up, trying to read the hands of the clock in the dim light and through the thick layer of cigarette smoke. Nine o’clock. It was possible to circumvent the boarding house’s eleven o’clock curfew if you stayed out all night and slipped back in time for breakfast, but tonight he had no desire to stay out and no chance of going home with anyone. He tapped Gilbert on the shoulder in an attempt to pull him out of his animated conversation.  
“We should be off.” he said, gesturing in the direction of the clock. It would stay light outside for a while yet, but they had ten miles to cover on their rather unreliable second-hand bicycles.  
Gilbert half-turned towards him. “Sorry? Oh right, yes, in a minute,” He placed a friendly hand on Mathias’s shoulder and made to introduce him to the two men he’d been talking to. “Berwald, Tino – this is my friend Mathias. He’s a stonemason, and he’s working on the house too.” 

The pair nodded in acknowledgement and the younger of the two, a boyish-looking man with a round face and eyes of a surprising shade of a delicate purple, stuck his hand out to be shaken.   
“Nice to meet you!” he said brightly as Mathias took it. “I’m Tino. Tino Väinämöinen in full, but don’t worry too much about that. The name’s Finnish,” he added by way of explanation, having seen Mathias’s face as he struggled to place the unfamiliar language. “But my father visited the north of England, fell in love with the mountains and my mother and decided to stay,” He had a pleasantly light voice, if a little high, and smiled broadly at the man sitting next to him. “This is my friend Berwald,” he continued. “Well, I say he’s my friend – really, we just met today,” Berwald blushed faintly, but Tino seemed not to notice and pressed on with his introduction. “He’s a furniture restorer and I’m a gardener.”

Berwald, seeming to realise that something was now required of him, proffered his own hand. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a severe set to his face and eyes that were carefully expressionless behind a pair of glasses that were functional rather than fashionable.  
“Good evening.” he mumbled, more shyly than Mathias had expected. But it was not that which surprised him. It was that Berwald spoke with an accent that was strong and dark and so desperately, achingly familiar.  
“Where are you from?” Mathias found himself asking, captivated by the sound of his voice.  
“Sweden,” Berwald replied. “Heard there weren’t enough workers over here and thought I’d come and do what I could.”  
Not quite right then, Mathias thought with plunging disappointment. Not the right side of that narrow channel of water. “Were you ever in Denmark?” he asked as the hope of a connection with his homeland disappeared.  
“I saw it from the boat,” Berwald said. “Just as I was leaving.”

Mathias sighed. “My father was Danish,” he explained, feeling like he’d made a fool of himself with his childish question. “You sound a little like him.  
“And mine was Prussian!” Gilbert interjected, although he was careful to keep his voice down in a pub full of former soldiers. Mathias felt a spark of irritation. Gilbert had no idea how much the broken link with his homeland meant to him. He had a brother, after all – someone to speak his native language to. “Denmark, Sweden, Finland,” Gilbert was saying, pointing to each of the group in turn. “Prussia,” he added, pointing to himself. “What shall we call ourselves then?” he asked cheerfully. “The northerners? The foreigners? All we need now is a Norwegian and we’ll have the whole set.”

Mathias stood up abruptly, his memories suddenly forced to the front of his mind. “We really need to be getting home, Gil,” he said with forced lightness. “We don’t want to be locked out.”  
“Oh, it’s alright!” Gilbert reassured him. “We’ve got time. And the landlady’s daughter clearly fancies me, so even if we’re late she’ll come to our rescue.”  
“Nonetheless, it’s better to be sure.” Mathias replied through gritted teeth. He needed to be in his room, alone, so that he could finally conduct the lengthy post-mortem of his and Lukas’s terrible reunion. There was too much noise here – too much laughter, that awful, manic laughter that masked the men’s memories of a time when they feared they would never laugh again.  
Gilbert shrugged as if Mathias was being unreasonable and stood up slowly. “I suppose this is goodbye for the evening then, my friends,” he said to Berwald and Tino. “Pleasure meeting both of you. I expect I’ll see you tomorrow.”  
“Come on, it’s nine-fifteen!” Mathias urged him.  
“Yes, mother.” Gilbert replied. He and Tino both laughed, and Mathias felt something in him sliding further into the pit of death. If he lost his good humour, his defining feature, then surely his very reason for living would follow. Then again, perhaps it already had. Perhaps he was alive simply because he had no reason to die.

…

Mathias was furious. More than that, he was afraid of himself. He could do anything when he was like this, absolutely anything. There was a darkness in him, but it was not a quiet darkness. It boiled and rippled, full of noise and flashes of memory, full of the desperate fear and blinding anger of war, and it refused to lie quiet. He could feel it twisting in him now, in his mind, pressing up behind his eyes. It lay trapped behind his clenched teeth, trying to push itself out in the form of a scream, a sob – anything at all. He pressed a hand over his mouth, not wanting the darkness to win, not wanting to let it out. For as long as it lay trapped inside him, he was normal. It was only if he released it that he would become like those men tucked away in convalescent homes, those glorified asylums. He refused to be one of them – he would not become a trembling, weeping wreck, an empty husk in whose eyes stretched the terrible blankness of a field after battle. 

He knew he was crying. He had ceased to be ashamed of it long ago, but there was still a public unwillingness to discuss the idea that these fighting men, these brave sons of Empire, could have returned home covered not in glory but in the indelible blood of men and boys their own age. The soldiers had always been taught to attack without mercy, to aim at an enemy and blast away, and it was for this reason that, when the darkness came to blot out everything else, a former soldier would so often aim the gun at his own head.

It was midnight, the candlewick guttering helplessly in its last few drops of wax. Mathias wanted so desperately to go to sleep, but he was terrified of what might await him there. He pressed his back against the metal frame of the bed, feeling the shock of the cold iron through his thin shirt, and willed himself to keep awake. It was one of those nights when he could not bear to close his eyes. The darkness was there, and it was patient, and it would reel him in if he let his guard down for a moment. Morning would come, if he waited long enough, and the new day would bring work, and casual chat with Gilbert, and Lukas.

Lukas – oh God, Lukas! How could their love, the thing for which he had held such high hopes, have gone so completely wrong? Love – he had never called it that before, and it felt strange to do so, because it brought an unwelcome sense of profundity to an encounter that he had never previously considered to have meaning. Lukas had felt something for him – Mathias couldn’t be sure what, but there had been something. Lukas had cared about him and, when he thought he was dead, had mourned him. In light of his new knowledge, his decision not to write showed itself to be not an act of pride or self-preservation, but unutterably cruel. Without knowing it, he had been torturing Lukas with a silence that was worse than a telegram from the War Office, worse than a curt note breaking off relations, worse than anything at all. The horrible uncertainty, the awful limbo of being listed ‘missing in action’. The blank notice of injury card loomed in his imagination, condemning him for having wasted it. 

He thought, too late, about all the comfort a letter from Lukas might have brought him, how vital one would have been on his worst days. And yet the unwritten letters were nothing compared to his greater sins. How many men had he been with throughout the war? How many afterwards? This artificial love, this mechanised relief, was so much worse now when he realised that Lukas must have been waiting for him. Each individual entanglement became an affair, an act of unfaithfulness, an unforgivable betrayal of the trust he had not even known Lukas had had in him. Mathias forced his back harder against the bed frame, so that the metal dug into his spine. He was nobody. He was balancing on the surface of a misery so deep that if he fell into it, he would be lost forever. He buried his head in his hands and his struggling candle, its wick all burnt away, was subsumed into the darkness. No use trying to ward it off, really. The darkness was in him, and it was him. It was his nature, and it was inseparable from who he had been before.

…

The next day passed uneventfully. Mathias, having accidentally fallen asleep, had woken early and exhausted from a brief, violent dream that was best forgotten, and had largely been able to put the previous night’s terrors to the back of his mind. As long as he kept his thoughts full of work, football and conversation, the darkness would be buried – at least until he was alone again. He had made an impressive amount of progress on the first statue, then had taken a break for lunch with Gilbert, Berwald and Tino, listening with shock to Tino’s stories of being a ‘legendary’ sniper during the war. He would be twenty in December – officially too young to have fought – but he had enlisted in 1916 with a forged birth certificate and quickly built up a reputation. He was proud of the medals and attention he had got for himself, and it had been a struggle for Mathias to remain focused on what was in front of him and stop himself from retreating into the black pit of his own four years of undistinguished service. It was not Tino who had celebrated shooting twelve men in a single day, Mathias reminded himself, just as it had not been him throwing a grenade into the face of an oncoming enemy. They had been soldiers then, and now they were ordinary men. They had not murdered those enemies, merely followed an order to kill, which was most emphatically not the same thing. Or so Mathias so desperately wished he could believe.

By six o’clock, when the workers were packing up their tools and drifting off in the direction of their lodgings or the pub, Lukas had still not made an appearance. This irritated some of the men, including Gilbert, who felt that it was an act of snobbery. It worried Mathias, who knew that it was because Lukas was avoiding him, or perhaps the memories and emotions that Mathias triggered in him. Sighing, Mathias began to gather his things together. It was a testimony to the illogicality of love, he supposed, that after all this time he could still desire Lukas – that his face could still heat up at the thought of touching him, kissing him, pledging himself completely to him. 

He stopped, a chisel still absently clutched in one hand, and stood conflicted for a moment. Eventually, he sighed and bent down, unpacking his bag again. He would stay here after everyone else, he decided, then slip into the house and try to get Lukas to listen to him long enough to understand. What Lukas needed to understand, he did not know, and nor did he know how he would explain it, but he knew how important it was to talk to him. 

Having decided on this course of action, he began tapping away at the statue once more, putting on a show of being hard at work and waiting impatiently for all others to leave. Gilbert came up to him and asked why he was staying; he replied that he wanted to get ‘just this last bit’ finished and told Gilbert to make sure no one took his bicycle. His hands were slick with nervous sweat, and he could barely keep hold of his tools. The terrible reunion with Lukas ran through his mind again and again, and he analysed every word and movement like a playwright trying to communicate a world of meaning to his audience through a single throwaway gesture. ‘I had already mourned you’, Lukas had said. What did that mean? That, once the war was over, he had had shed no more tears for him? That he no longer felt anything for him at all?

…

The entrance hall gave the impression of work abruptly stopped. One damp-spotted wall had had half of a fresh coat of plaster applied and a largely ornamental chaise longue had been dragged out into the centre and placed on a dustsheet so that its frame could be varnished – Mathias found himself wondering if this was Berwald’s handiwork. But there was a depressing amount left to do. The chandelier was speckled with tarnish, its glass pendants almost opaque with dust. The whitewashed ceiling was the lumpy texture of curdled milk and grey with neglect. He had never seen Lille Skarstind in its glory days, but now it was in a truly dreadful state. If Lukas was intending to sell it, he’d be lucky if he got enough to pay all the workers, Mathias thought.

It broke his heart to see the house like this. He knew the place too well to be unmoved by its decline. There, off to the sides, were the two long corridors that linked all the rooms on the ground floor. There, untouched for years, was the side table where invitations and calling-cards would be placed until the lady of the house was ready to look through them. And there, winding away above him, was the main staircase. And Lukas had stood just – there. And from there he had spoken to him. And then he had run down to him, nervous, unable to look him in the eye, and what had followed had been the worst mistake of both their lives. If they had just waited, Mathias thought, they could have kept up a correspondence. Their relationship would have developed properly, with the passing of time. They could have come home and visited each other on leave, and there would have been no question in his mind about whether to tell him about his wound. They could have been one of those couples – and Mathias knew they existed – who, through careful secrecy and highly selective social mixing, were able to stay together for years at a time despite the very nature of their relationship being illegal. 

He put a foot on the first step, and it creaked under him. He felt a weakness in it, and resolved to tread carefully. Only twice in his life had he climbed these stairs – once up, and once down. Only once – today – had he entered through the front door, and only once had he left through it. He breathed in the heavy dampness of the house. It was unhealthy, this thick air that settled in the lungs. It reminded him, as all things did, of the war – of the wet heat of chlorine searing the soldiers’ airways, and how lucky he had been to escape that particular torment.  
“Lukas!” he called up the stairs, his voice echoing hollowly in the silence like someone was mocking his desperation.  
Footsteps, quick and moving away from him. A door slamming.  
“Lukas!” he called again. “Why won’t you talk to me?”  
There was no answer, and his ears rang and buzzed with the silence, a sound like the shriek of shells. Mathias felt a twist of nerves. Who was in the wrong here? Was it him, for letting Lukas believe he was dead, or Lukas, for refusing to listen to him now?

He climbed the stairs and turned down a hallway, once grandiloquently termed the ‘long gallery’. The paintings on the walls had mostly been sold off, but the occasional Bondevik ancestor had been spared, glaring down at Mathias as he followed the all-too-familiar route to the room from which he had once heard music, the room with the bed with the red curtains. He passed by doors that he knew would be locked and swollen in their frames, and others that he knew would lead to empty rooms. He had wanted to go to the auction with Arthur, but had firmly been told to stay behind. It had hurt Arthur, he knew, to see the house to which he had devoted his professional life – his whole life, really – be sold off piece by piece.

He came to the door. A memory rose in him, a memory of a night when he had drunk a little too much and stood here and listened to Lukas’s faint music and longed, more than anything else, to tell him how he felt. It was disconcerting, an extreme sort of déjà vu, and as he stood there he felt all the ideas and versions of Lukas flooding his mind at once. There was the shy schoolboy he had been when they met, watching him as he unpacked his suitcase. There was the idolised object of Mathias’s lust he had been all that blistering summer, the lambent beauty who had appeared in his dreams and smiled at him so tantalisingly on the night of the party. There was the imagined one, the one Mathias had convinced himself to hate all those long years. And then there was the real Lukas, the one who had made all Mathias’s memories and ideas irrelevant, the one who even now was hiding from him because Mathias had wounded him. Because he had betrayed him. Because they had been two eighteen-year-old boys with no understanding of the workings of the heart.

Mathias took a deep breath, pulled himself up to his full height and knocked.  
“Lukas?” he said pleadingly. “Lukas, will you let me in?”  
He heard the sound of a book snapping shut, then Lukas moving restlessly. “No.” came the eventual reply, but the voice was weak and irresolute.   
Mathias sighed. “You don’t have to let me in. Will you just open the door?” He knocked again. “Please. I just want to talk to you.”

There was more movement, then Mathias heard the clicking of Lukas’s shoes as he walked to the door and the squeaking of the hinges as he opened it.  
“Is there a problem with the work?” Lukas asked, his voice dull and flat. The door was only open a crack, but through it Mathias could glimpse what looked like Lukas’s whole life. A tin bath stood in front of the fireplace, and washed shirts had been draped over the fireguard to dry. Books were piled high on the floor, and there were three photograph frames arranged on the bedside table, although Mathias couldn’t quite make out who was in the pictures. Lukas kept his hand on the doorknob, as though ready to slam it shut at any moment.  
“You know that’s not it.” Mathias said, exasperated.  
Lukas shrugged, putting on a show of not understanding. “Then I don’t know what it has to do with me.” he replied, outwardly calm but unable to look Mathias in the eye.

Mathias wanted to seize his face, to force it upwards and make him look at him. He was tired of this evasiveness.  
“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” he managed to say at last, shoving his violent thoughts back into the boiling darkness. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “For not writing.”  
Lukas closed his eyes for a moment, sighing. “If you so clearly didn’t want anything to do with me,” he began softly. “Then why did you come here again? To laugh at me?” He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed his shabby room. “Does it make you happy, the fact that this is all I’ve got left?”  
Mathias shook his head, horrified. Had his silence really been so cruel that Lukas would assume the worst of him like that? “I wanted to see you again,” he admitted. “I just wasn’t sure if you wanted to see me.”  
Lukas tightened his grip on the doorknob, his other hand clinging to the edge of the door. “The war ended nearly two years ago,” he replied. “Why have you only come now?”

Mathias ran through a hundred possible answers in his head, then finally decided on the truth. “I didn’t think you were interested in… pursuing a relationship.” he said eventually.  
Lukas looked to be on the verge of tears. “I’m not anymore, Mathias,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I’ve had so much else to think about since you left.”  
It was then that something occurred to Mathias, something so obvious he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before: Lukas was alone in the house. “Where’s your mother?” he asked. “Where’s Emil?”  
“My mother is dead,” said Lukas flatly. “She was ill to begin with, and the damp didn’t do her any good. I tried to make her go somewhere else, but she thought it was her duty to stay.”  
“And Emil?”  
A look of unguarded pain flashed across Lukas’s face, and his eyes darkened with despair. “He doesn’t live here anymore.” he said.  
“He’s not…”  
“No, he’s not dead,” Lukas said, his voice suddenly angry. “He just lives somewhere else now. Somewhere better,” He bit down on his lip. “I have to stay here, in case he wants to come home. I have a duty to him,” He sighed. “My mother went to see him once, before she got ill, and then she couldn’t bear to go again.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Mathias asked.  
“Nothing to do with you,” Lukas replied sharply. “And I think you should go now.” The transformation in him was startling – he had gone from confessional to secretive in just a few seconds.  
Mathias was startled. “I only…”  
“This house may not be as grand as it once was,” Lukas said. “But it’s still my property. You’re on my property, and I’m ordering you off it.”  
“We’re all soldiers here!” Mathias protested. “You can tell me what happened. I’ll understand.”  
The door slammed shut.


	7. The Men whose Minds the Dead Have Ravished

Author’s Note: Hi guys! I know it’s been a while, but I’ve been really busy with starting my A-Levels at a new sixth form (I’m taking French, Spanish, English Literature and Religious Studies, if you care), so I haven’t really been able to write much. This is also a very sensitive chapter, so I wanted to do my research beforehand and make sure everything was presented in the right way. For a far better description of the soldiers’ suffering than I could ever create, I recommend that you read Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Mental Cases’ (which the chapter title is quoted from) and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Survivors’ – I could write every day for a hundred years and never create a simile as perfect as Owen’s ‘Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh’.

…

August 1920

A fly whirred feebly against the window of the train, climbing the pane a few inches, then dropping down again before reaching the open top section. Someone laughed, distantly, on the platform; the guard unhurriedly listed off the stops. Lukas pulled his watch out of his pocket and consulted it, his customary frown deepening for a moment. Mathias looked over at him, then looked away just as quickly as Lukas raised his eyes from his watch and caught him doing so. The train seemed unwilling to pull away from the station on such a languidly hot day, and when it eventually began to move, it was with a sullen, reluctant jolt that made all the passengers tense in their seats. The women fanned themselves with rolled-up magazines, and all the men in the carriage surreptitiously loosened their collars. Mathias pulled the knot of his tie down an inch or two so that it no longer rested uncomfortably against his throat, feeling irritated by the stinging itch of his damp shirt sticking to his back.

Sighing at the delay, Lukas snapped his watch shut and put it back into his pocket. His hand went to his hair, then, catching himself in this nervous act, he crossed his arms and looked distractedly out of the window as the scorched summer fields slipped by, the stooped and scattered figures of the labourers just visible as the train picked up speed. The sky was majestically, emptily blue, the horizon a perfect divide between it and the flat landscape. Mathias risked another glance at Lukas, then turned to face the window. The brightness of the sky made his eyes sting and water. Piercing blue. He had never really understood that phrase before. 

Lukas opened the book he had brought with him and, after a few minutes, Mathias judged it safe to abandon the view from the window. It was the first time he had really got a good look at Lukas since their reunion, and he had changed since that boyhood summer of 1914. There was a small tear in one of the sleeves of his jacket, and it had been repaired with wide, erratic stitches that reminded Mathias of a child’s first attempt at writing. It was the work of someone who had never had to sew before, and Mathias was certain that Lukas had done it himself. He was thinner than before, too – no longer slender, but thin. Hunger, maybe – not starvation, but careful rationing. Or maybe it was stress, for Mathias could see the first premature lines of worry beginning to appear, subtly as yet, around the eyes which seemed to be darkening with despair. There was no glint in them; the moon and stars were extinguished, and the night sky lay dull and flat in its own darkness.

Since that evening when Lukas had slammed the door in his face, their encounters had been sporadic and impersonal. He had seen him at the end of June and July, when he had come to give the workers their pay. There had been less than expected, and those who could afford to move on had done so. When it had come to his turn, Mathias had tried to catch his eye, but Lukas had simply handed him the envelope with his name on it, and said nothing. Occasionally, Lukas would inspect the work, but he always avoided the statues, and his interactions with the other workers were peremptory. “Don’t care much for him upstairs,” Gilbert had said one day. “Thinks he’s too bloody good for us, doesn’t he? Well, I’d like to tell him this: it’s not my roof that’s falling in.” Mathias had nodded in feigned agreement, and taken another drag of his cigarette. He had been so profoundly tired – far too tired to even begin to explain the pain that Lukas’s cold demeanour masked, and far too guilty to admit who it was that had made him feel like that.

And that was why it had been such a shock when Lukas had come to him, urgent and unbidden, one evening when he was preparing to leave.   
“Mathias,” he had said, as nervous as that night six years before. “Mathias, I must ask you something.”  
Mathias had said nothing, but inclined his head for Lukas to go on.  
“I know you remember Emil. You met him when you were working here.”  
Mathias’s overarching impression had been one of a rather arrogant teenage boy who had made him feel ignorant over that little business with the Iliad, but he nodded nonetheless.  
“I go and see him sometimes,” Lukas had continued. “I’m the only person from his old life. My mother and Mr Kirkland are dead, as are a good few of his friends. I know he’ll remember you if he sees you, and maybe…” Here he had paused, looking down at the ground like a scolded child. “… Maybe you can talk to him. About the fighting. It might help him, being with someone who understands.”

Mathias had begun to suspect where Emil might have ended up, and a creeping dread had come over him. He would go to most places without a second thought, but not there – never, ever there. But then an image flashed into his mind, of Emil sitting and laughing, innocent, with that boy on the night of the party. The war had broken Mathias, and he was someone already inured to pain and disappointment. What it would have done to Emil – the boy, the cherished youngest child – was unthinkable. To refuse to see him would be another act of unbearable cruelty to Lukas, and perhaps the worst one of all.  
“I’ll come.” he’d said at last, and seen a solitary spark of hope light in Lukas’s eyes, just for a moment.  
“Thank you,” Lukas had replied, sincerely. “I do talk to him, you know, but there are certain things… Thank you.”

…

Emil’s new home was quite a walk away from the station, a strenuous four miles across fields, through rusty-hinged gates and over stiles. There was a bus that would get them much nearer and in a fraction of the time, but Lukas had been unwilling to take it and Mathias, seeing how carefully he had counted out the coins for their third-class train tickets, had said nothing. 

There was no shelter from the heat out here in the open fields, and Mathias could feel the hot sting of sunburn beginning to prick at his neck as he followed Lukas, who was leading the way a few yards ahead of him. The landscape reminded him of the endless marches through the French countryside and, alone as he was, he soon found himself slipping into one of his introspective moods.

The stillness of the day, he felt, in some way resembled his own life. Its lack of movement was cloying and lay all around him – he was excruciatingly aware of it, but he could do nothing about it. There was nothing that could provide the metaphorical breath of wind to set things in motion again. Worse, he knew that the men he had fought alongside were moving on without him. Several had married and started families, and had escaped their demons that way. A few had found work of a more fulfilling sort than soldiering, instead starting their own businesses or following some previously ignored vocation. Others sought their release in a different way, and at least one of Mathias’s comrades had silenced the voices in his head by putting a gun to it. 

And yet, he himself had done nothing. It was impossible for him to do anything when he lived so deeply buried in his memories. He had come to distrust happiness – for him, every smile was a mask, and every reconstructed life a work of artifice. It was impossible for him to believe that anyone had really managed to put the war behind them. And if they had, what was wrong with him? If they had, why couldn’t he? He hated his life, and the way he was doing nothing with it. He worked, yes, but not towards anything in particular. He had friends, but in time they too would move on and leave him. Gilbert was always teasing the girls – soon something more would come of it, and Mathias would be left alone, unmarriageable, thrown into the same category as the men who needed only shut their eyes for the darkness and the fury to come rushing out at them. He felt that way himself, sometimes.

Ahead of him, Lukas paused to shift his satchel a little higher on his shoulder. Mathias watched him with a helpless sort of longing. He had come to realise that he had no chance with him now, not after all that had happened. Lukas was, to put it simply, totally uninterested in forming any sort of relationship. They had had their chance, and quite spectacularly missed it. And yet Lukas was the only one who could spark any sort of emotion in him, even if it was painful. Gilbert and all the rest were good fun, but the feeling they gave him was a sort of soft, vaguely contented warmth – nothing as profound as the searing knife of frustrated attraction that the merest glimpse of Lukas could send through him. It was painful, but the pain was good, because it reminded him that he could still feel things and, most of the time, it was a reminder he sorely needed.

He had not slept with anyone since his reunion with Lukas, and was no longer interested in doing so. He had cheapened the idea of it – defiled the very act of love itself until it was nothing more to him than a sequence of coldly itemised actions. He was too jaded for the thrill of experimentation and too experienced for nerves or excitement. To be indifferent to the fusing of souls – what a terrible, terrible way to live! Even if he went with Lukas again, he thought, what made him think that it would be any different from what he had had with everyone else? Every last drop of feeling in him had been squeezed out long ago, and he had no love left to give. It was better this way, he thought. And safer, too. The police had a habit of infiltrating known ‘queer spots’, and he knew the danger of propositioning the wrong person. Even asking for it was enough – the intention without the act could still land you in prison for a couple of years. 

Above him, the heat continued to press against his exposed neck, and the dry air was full of dust from the parched crops. All around him, Mathias heard the shrilling of insects, and the sound rose in his mind, and became one with the monumental dissonance of his own thoughts.

…

The house stood in a large and pleasant garden, with an immaculate lawn that, though bisected by a gravel driveway, swept all the way down to the gates. Along the edges, and at intervals in the grass itself, were small trees, some of which appeared to be gestating fruit for the autumn. The house itself was comfortably large, painted white with black window frames and a trellis up which a few tendrils of ivy were reluctantly beginning to climb. The French doors had been thrown open, and through them trickled the sound of an anodyne waltz being played on some distant gramophone.

Spread over the lawn were several benches and deckchairs, in which men sat and chatted, or read, or simply stared ahead of them. None of them could have been older than thirty, and they were all dressed in loose-fitting off-the-peg suits in a shade of light blue that made them look like office workers on a trip to the seaside. They all looked perfectly pleasant, the sort of people you’d enjoy a drink with and then never see again, and Mathias was terrified of them. 

He was terrified of them because there was no difference between him and them. They were there because their minds, like his, could not hold all the terror of war all at once, but, unlike him it had come spilling out in some act of violence, or a nervous breakdown, or a desperate attempt to run away from battle. Mathias felt something cold twist in his stomach. It was wrong for him to be here as a visitor. He felt sure that any moment now he would be identified as an impostor, and that a nurse would appear at his elbow to lead him, gently but firmly, to a quiet room set aside for madmen like him. Really, he realised with a sense of plunging horror, the only thing that separated him from the men here was that they had made the mistake of releasing the scream that he still held inside him, though it came perilously close to escaping at times. And if these men had gone mad because of the guilt of killing another human being, then what did Mathias’s continuing appearance of sanity say about him? Surely these men were better than him, in some strange way, because killing had caused them even more pain than it had caused him.

Mathias felt half-mad himself as he and Lukas approached the doors. The closer he came to the patients, the more he began to notice things that were not quite right with them. Some had walking sticks or crutches propped up beside them, others appeared to be paralysed and still others had faces a little twisted or puckered at the edges – reconstructed faces, sewn up to cover those awful gaping wounds that so haunted Mathias at night. He caught snatches of some the men’s conversations, and noticed that a few of them stammered terribly, while others kept up a series of small, compulsive movements – tapping on the arm of the bench, perhaps, or plucking at their clothes. It was such small signs as these that gave away the great, boiling abyss of madness inside them. All the doctors’ optimistic pronouncements aside, these men would never be normal again.

And neither will I, Mathias thought as Lukas led him into the house of madness. Neither will I.

…

Emil’s room was situated at the back of the house, on the first floor and reached by the back stairs. The corridor was painted in a calmly neutral shade of cream, a few still lifes hanging on the walls – no pictures with any hint of militarism, and no landscapes whose wide, empty fields could perhaps, to a painfully active imagination, suggest the battlefields of Belgium and France.   
“He’ll be in here,” Lukas whispered, pausing at the door. “He doesn’t go outside all that much. It irritates his chest,” He took a deep breath and shifted slightly from foot to foot. Eventually, he raised a hesitant fist to the door and knocked quietly. “Emil,” he said softly. “It’s me again. I’ve brought someone you might remember.”  
At first, Mathias was surprised by the gentleness in his tone, the affection so far removed from his usual expressionlessness, but then he remembered that Lukas had spoken to him like that once – only once, but it had been enough to haunt him ever since that night. He had spoken to him like that only once in his life, but in all his dreams throughout that boyhood summer, he had heard that soft voice whisper words of love to him, heard it make the extravagant promises that he had longed to make himself.

There was a silence just long enough for them to begin to feel anxious, then a voice somewhat deeper than Mathias remembered called out:  
“Come in. It’s not locked.”  
Lukas cast an unreadable look at Mathias, as if he wanted him to save him from his duty, then began to turn the handle. “Just talk to him as if you don’t notice anything.” he told him. He opened the door and together he and Mathias entered the room.

The room was rather more comfortable than what one would find in a hospital. The furnishings were of dark wood, glossy in the sunlight, and the bed was large and appeared to be soft. There were two wooden chairs and a matching table which was piled high with books and pieces of paper. From the wardrobe in the corner, the trapped sleeve of a shirt protruded, and the slow ticking of the clock marked off the minutes of their visit. With a little suspension of belief, the room could have been in a modest hotel, or a middle-class townhouse. But it was not, and they were not, and neither was Emil.

The boy, who Mathias saw was now a man, stood up as they entered. Mathias had been expecting the two brothers to embrace, but instead they stood awkwardly apart, separated by the unequal burden of their experiences.  
“How have you been?” Lukas asked, somewhat stiffly, the brightness in his voice as brittle as blown glass.  
“No better, no worse.” Emil replied. He paused to draw a handkerchief out of his pocket and coughed into it – a deep, violent cough. Chlorine, Mathias realised. The stuff was a poison, and you never quite got over the effects.  
“Have you been helping in the library? I told your doctor it might do you some good.” Lukas encouraged him.  
Emil shrugged. “When I feel like it,” he replied with a hint of his old truculence. “And who’s this you’ve brought with you?”  
Lukas gestured towards Mathias, who suddenly felt terribly vulnerable. “You remember, Mathias, don’t you? He worked at Lille Skarstind back when you were sixteen – that summer when we had the party, remember?” 

Emil turned towards him, and it took all of Mathias’s conscious will to prevent himself gasping in shock. From cheekbone to jaw, the left side of Emil’s face seemed almost to be made from some different sort of material – it was skin, yes, but it had been sewn on, grafted, put there to cover some awful wound. The corner of his mouth was twisted up, pulled into the shape of a permanent half-smile. And yet the worst thing about his face was the eyes of pale tyrian purple that, though outwardly undamaged, were full of the bleak stillness that Mathias so feared. Emil had been broken, and badly. His disfigurement was noticeable, though not hideous, but it was those eyes that held the true horror.

Mathias forced himself to speak. “Hello, Emil,” he said, the words sliding reluctantly past his lips. “I remember you. You laughed at me because I didn’t know Latin, that day under the tree.”  
Emil fixed him with a stare. “Did you fight?” he asked bluntly, ignoring Mathias’s recollection.   
“Yes,” Mathias replied, a little startled by the question. “I enlisted the week after the war broke out. I don’t suppose you remember me going off to the training camp?” There was no response. “I was wounded at the Somme, but I fought the whole four years.”  
“Then you’re a better man than him.” Emil replied, in a voice overflowing with bitterness, his words slightly distorted by the new shape of his mouth. With a dismissive toss of his head, he indicated ‘him’ to be Lukas.

There was an abrupt silence, and in his peripheral vision, Mathias saw Lukas’s hands clench into startled fists, the redness of shame or fury flooding into his cheeks like the jet of a gas flame suddenly turned up. Embarrassed, Mathias said nothing, one hand self-consciously fiddling with the knot of his tie. Of course Lukas had fought. Everyone had been conscripted. There had been no way out unless you were a doctor or policeman or had some sort of illness.  
With apparent difficulty, Lukas cleared his throat. “Would you leave us for a moment?” he asked Mathias, in a voice tight with suppressed emotion.  
And Mathias, eager to be out of the firing line, nodded and slipped away.

He lingered outside the door for a moment then, finding it impossible to make out the conversation, drifted downstairs through another pastel-coloured corridor adorned with pictures of fruits and flowers that, in the darkness of old oil paint, looked bruised and decaying. There was the faint smell of something cooking – something reassuringly English, like boiled beef – and the sound of two men talking, one professional, one plaintive. It was all rather different from his visions of a madhouse – there were no screams, no chains, no straitjackets – but he knew that the madness here was of a far more insidious type. And he was so close to it himself. Emil’s ravaged face loomed in his mind, stamped with the cold expression he had worn when denouncing his brother. Where had he been wounded like that? And what had it felt like when the shell had blown up in his face?

As he approached the garden, a young man dressed in the uniform of the patients poked his head around a door.  
“Hello there,” he said with childish enthusiasm. “Are you visiting?”   
Mathias nodded. “I’m here with a friend,” he replied, not knowing if it was true or not. “He’s just talking to his brother at the moment.”  
“We’re just about to sit down to lunch,” said the man. “You’re more than welcome to come and join us.”  
Something in the man’s guilelessness broke Mathias’s heart. He knew that he had reverted to this childlike state as his mind’s way of escaping the horrors of his memories, and he wanted more than anything else to accept the invitation. But something in him rebelled against the idea, perhaps the idea that, just as in the kingdom of fairies, if he ate the food of this place he would be trapped in it.  
“No, thank you,” he replied, forcing a smile. “I ate a little while ago. Couldn’t fit another bite!”  
The man grinned – too wide, too uninhibited – and shrugged. “Very well then. Have a pleasant evening.”  
“You too.” Mathias murmured, and went out into the garden – the outside world, the land of the living – to be alone with the thoughts that so terrified him.

…

The sun was setting as the train began its slow journey through the villages, and he and Lukas were alone in their carriage. They had said very little to each other since the scene in Emil’s room, and Lukas seemed badly shaken.  
“How was Emil?” Mathias asked, once he could bear the silence no longer. He knew he was unlikely to get an answer, but decided it was worth a try anyway.   
“Not as bad as some,” Lukas muttered in response, making no reference to the conversation they had had after Mathias’s departure. “Argumentative, as you saw. They say that’s better than just giving up on life the way some of them have.”  
The way I have, Mathias added silently. The day had unnerved him. Deep in his mind, he felt the darkness beginning to rise again, and he knew he would get no sleep tonight. “How long has he been living there?” he asked.  
“A year or so,” Lukas replied. “He was in a hospital before that. They gave him electric shocks all the time.”  
“Why don’t you bring him home? It might be the best thing for him.” Mathias advised.

Lukas shook his head and moved back in his seat, burying himself deeper in the evening shadows. “I don’t want him being looked at.” he said sullenly.  
“Is it that?” Mathias persisted. “Or is it more that you don’t want to have to look at him?”  
Lukas folded his arms. His face was obscured, but Mathias heard the crack in his voice. “If you must know, it’s because he doesn’t want to see me,” He sighed. “You can be so cruel sometimes. Both of you can. And what’s more, neither of you really understands what you’re saying at all."


	8. When the Blindness Lifted

Author’s Note: Hey guys! I know it’s been four weeks and I’m so sorry. School has been really stressful, and on top of that I had real trouble getting this chapter out because I know how I’m going to end the story, but I don’t know how to get there. So yeah, sorry again about the wait, and I hope you like the chapter!  
PS: There is a brief mention of public school in this chapter. American readers, this does not mean state school! The public schools are, confusingly, the very old and expensive private schools like Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and so on.  
PPS: What do you guys think of the poetry quotes? Should I do a couple for every chapter?

…

 

You’re quiet and peaceful, summering safe at home;   
You’d never think there was a bloody war on!...   
O yes, you would ... why, you can hear the guns.   
Hark! Thud, thud, thud,—quite soft ... they never cease—  
Those whispering guns—O Christ, I want to go out   
And screech at them to stop—I’m going crazy;   
I’m going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

\- Repression of War Experience, Siegfried Sassoon 

 

Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;   
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad. 

 

-Survivors, Siegfried Sassoon  
…

August 1920

It had been more than a week since the visit to Emil, and the weather had still not yet broken. Mathias sat on the front steps of Lille Skarstind, too hot to work, and screwed up his eyes against the sky that was too bright to look at. The rough dust of the statues was ingrained in the lines of his palms, a stinging itch, and when he moved he felt the nasty little specks shifting in the seams of his shirt. From inside the house, he heard the distant thuds of things being moved and voices, distorted by distance, calling out to each other. The air was tight and heavy with the promise of rain.

He thought of Emil. He thought of him, and found himself overwhelmed by a profound sense of compassion. He almost loved him, as if Emil being Lukas’s brother somehow made him his own. Then again, maybe it was more down to the fact that all soldiers tended to consider their comrades brothers. You got that close pretty quickly in the trenches, with all you saw and did together, and it was a comfort to know that there was someone to mourn you, even if you had no one at home to care. He shook his head to banish an image of Lukas fretting over the casualty lists.

Seeing Emil had shocked him deeply. He had seen more horrific injuries than he could ever count, but he had never really known anyone who had suffered like that – he had never known anyone before the war had changed them. Mathias ran a hand over his unscarred chin, grimacing at the thought of Emil’s puckered patchwork of skin, the asymmetric mouth from which his words leaked, sometimes incoherent. He could barely imagine the explosion, Emil raising his hand to his cheek to assess the damage and feeling – teeth? Yes, teeth, through the gaping hole in his face. Mathias had seen men with similar injuries, blood-soaked handkerchiefs bundled against their wounds, ribbons of bloody flesh flaming at the edges and blood-slimed teeth glinting through the holes. And then the chlorine – he must have got that first, then had his face smashed up after he’d been sent to the front lines again. Chlorine – what torment! After the burning and blindness lifted, you were left with dissolving lungs and a ceaseless, liquid cough. Emil would be dead in his forties with a poisoning case like that. 

And all this was saying nothing of his mental state. Mathias had spent perhaps five minutes with him, but that had been enough – a single look into those eyes would have been enough. There was the emptiness in them present in the eyes of all men whose thoughts were so terrible that they preferred not to think at all. More than that, there was the flatness in his speech, the inability to engage with any conversation that might divert him from the torture of his eternal introspection. Mathias remembered the boy of sixteen, not quite as beautiful as his brother – but then again, no one could have rivalled Lukas that febrile summer – with his hint of arrogance and his casual mockery over that business with the Iliad. None of that mattered anymore. Mathias had forgiven him the moment he laid eyes on that ruined face. A wave of sadness broke over him. All at once, he wanted to take Emil in his arms, to hold him the way soldiers sometimes cradled their dying friends, and tell him that he knew what it was like to be afraid to sleep, and that he too lived in a world where almost everything was a reminder of war.

Time passed. The sounds of workers going about their business in the house continued. The unkempt trees rustled with birds flying in and out. The sun cooled for a moment as it passed behind a cloud, then reappeared. Mathias wiped his gritty hands on his trousers with a slow scraping motion. He was sick with the heat, and his vision shimmered like a mirage. His head was spinning, and he felt distant from everything, as if his mind had somehow separated from his body. The world receded from him, and when Lukas sat down next to him, he thought it was a dream.

At first, he dared not turn to look. He had no idea what Lukas thought of him now after his insinuation – his suggestion that, perhaps, Lukas was ashamed to look at his own brother. He was ashamed of something, yes – or, Emil had implied, had reason to be so – but it was a private shame, more to do with what he thought of himself than with what other people thought of him. Mathias realised just how cruel his suggestion had been. That crack in the voice – had Lukas been crying, again, because of something he had done? It was all too much to think about.

Lukas shifted position and, accidentally, their legs brushed together. Mathias tensed at the fleeting, unexpected contact, a sensation like an electric shock. It was the first time they had touched each other in six years. All at once, he became profoundly aware of Lukas’s body. He cast a furtive glance at him, not yet wanting to break the silence. Whenever they tried to have a conversation, something went wrong. Perhaps simply saying nothing was the best compromise. Never before had he felt so keenly the presence of another person beside him, the presence of another mind thinking about… what? Mathias studied Lukas’s hands where they clasped one of his knees. He had never seen such delicate hands on anyone else – elegant, with a touch of the feminine about them, moving with the lightness of a melody on the flute. He watched Lukas, and traced with his eyes the delicate curve of his shoulders, and felt exhausted from the six years he had spent suffering the pangs of what is often called love.

“I tried to write to you once, you know,” Lukas said, into the silence. He did not look at Mathias. “I sent it care of the regiment, asking them to see that it got to you. They sent it back a few weeks later. They couldn’t find you. Every time it got to somewhere you’d been, you’d moved on again. I hadn’t the faintest idea where you might be.”  
Mathias let his gaze fall away from Lukas, shame stinging his eyes. His own unwritten letters suddenly sprang into being. Would it really have been so difficult to send a line or two? Yes, yes it would. Even now, he didn’t know how to describe his time in the war. “What did you write?” he asked softly. He wasn’t shocked at the revelation, not really.  
“That I missed you,” Lukas replied, his voice expressionless. “That I hoped you were safe. That I wanted to see you again.”

For a moment, Mathias could not reply. He looked at Lukas again, remembering that night they had so unsuccessfully tried to love each other. He had seen him naked, seen his pearlescent skin without a mark that was so like the midnight sun in the land that had given him his name. Lukas, silent Lukas, now sat beside him, denuded and made vulnerable by his confession, and Mathias had never felt so confused. He had never been so lost for words.  
“I’m sorry.” he said simply, meaning it for Lukas and Emil and anyone else who had, directly or indirectly, suffered on account of the war.  
Lukas shrugged, stoical. “It’s done now.” he murmured.  
“I really am. I feel awful now.” Mathias persisted.  
Lukas shook his head and looked away. “It was all a very long time ago.”

Mathias remembered the boat to France. He had stood on the upper deck and watched the sea, his legs tensed against the rocking movement so tantalisingly familiar from his days with his father. The water had glittered then, alive with the promise of fish; on that October day, it had lain flat and grey, pockmarked by an English coastal drizzle. Lukas was right. It was a long time ago, centuries ago, a million bloody lifetimes ago.  
“They’ll say that about the war one day, you know.” Mathias said.  
Lukas shook his head again. “We’ll remember them,” he replied. “We’ll always remember them.”  
Mathias gave a wan smile. “I’d rather everyone forgot,” he said. “I don’t want to remember. I can’t see why anyone would.”

They fell silent then, and Mathias found himself thinking about the previous November, the awful ceremony that had surrounded the first anniversary of the war’s end. Two minutes’ silence to be observed throughout the whole country – two minutes’ silence, in which the screams of the dead rang even louder in his ears. Two minutes set aside to honour the ‘glorious dead’. The phrase made his skin crawl. Glory was not dirty and sobbing and covered in blood. Glory belonged to other wars, to the great pitched battles of the Romans and the triumphal, imperial processions through the streets of the city. Mathias had known war, and he knew that it was not glorious. He had bought his poppy all right, the red petals bright against his dull workaday clothes, and worn it commemoration of the flowers that had burst like beacons of hope through the battle-ripped earth, but privately he had longed for a poppy of his own – an opium poppy, white for the bliss of forgetting.

“But surely you want people to learn from the past?” Lukas asked, jerking Mathias out of his thoughts of petals falling from the sky, brighter than blood and as silent as ashes.  
Mathias grimaced. “Learn? Do you think that all these commemorations are because we’ve learnt? We have them because we won. Is this country sorry for all the deaths?” The question, designed to be rhetorical, hung in the air. Lukas cast a nervous eye up at him, but did not reply. Mathias answered for him. “No,” he said. “It’s proud of them,” He sighed deeply. “Look at Emil. Do you think he wants to remember? We go mad, all of us soldiers, because we can’t forget.”  
Lukas’s face hardened at the mention of Emil. “Don’t you bring my brother into this,” he warned Mathias. “It’s not about him.”  
“It’s about all of us!” Mathias protested. “You and me and him and all the thousands and thousands of others,” Something occurred to him then, and it chilled him. Lukas was talking about the war like an observer, someone who knew what it should be like but not what had really happened. With a knot in his stomach, he asked the terrible question, “Did you even go to war?”  
Lukas snatched his eyes away with a hurried, guilty motion. “We’ve all got things we want to forget, Mathias.” he said.

…

It was almost a relief to be back inside the house. Mathias’s anxiety at crossing the lawn again had been so acute, so crippling, that the neutral colours and drab paintings of Emil’s new home – half asylum, half strange holiday villa – had seemed almost welcoming. It had been torture to see those men again, to see their wounds and disfigurements and hear their horrible, stuttering, jarring speech. To his shame, he had not been able to force himself to look at them. Instead, he had dropped his eyes to the ground and prayed that he would not be recognised and called out to. Those poor boys – those poor, bloody, unfixable boys. He supposed that they too must have worn their poppies in November – worn them for the dead, and told to be thankful that they themselves still lived. And yet, for them and him, the dead were not to be mourned but rather to be envied. They had made a clean break with life, and the country was proud of them. Those who were not so lucky – himself, Emil, and so many others – had done half a job, managing to stay alive but having nothing to live for. They were forced to linger in a world of pain and memory, and the inconvenient fact of their existence was glossed over.

It was difficult for soldiers to articulate their experiences, and the task became nearly impossible when they had to explain them to those who had not seen. Some had turned to poetry, though art is always more controversial when it is truthful, and had been able to express their feelings through it. Mathias had bought a cheap edition of Wilfred Owen’s work, and, although sickened and disturbed by the scenes described, their familiarity and the knowledge that Owen too had seen things brought him a certain sort of comfort. When viewed against such despairing truth, Dorian Gray, in all his vainglory, seemed hopelessly, disgustingly self-absorbed, no longer able to make Mathias feel any of the things he had at sixteen. And yet, did he not still read his favourite passages again and again, wanting to substitute thoughts of jewels and paintings and parties for the unremitting darkness of his memories? And had he not only the night before pressed his trembling lips to the page that so reminded him of Lukas? Enough of that. Enough. He had come to see Emil, and he had come alone.

The corridor was empty, the rooms silent and closed. There was nothing to distract him now, no reason to prevaricate further. He had been standing outside Emil’s room for several minutes now, several minutes during which he had failed to steel himself to do his duty. He knew it was the right thing. And yet, as he knocked, there was a part of him that could not help but hope that no one would answer…

“Who’s there?” The voice, sharp and irritated, cut through Mathias’s thoughts.  
Swallowing, he made to reply. “It’s Mathias. Lukas’s friend. I thought you might want to talk to me.”  
“Is he with you?” Emil asked, his voice distrustful.  
“No,” Mathias reassured him. “I came alone. He doesn’t know I’m here.”  
There was a brief silence, then: “You can come in.”

On entering, Mathias found the room much the same as before – a little tidier, as if a maid had given it a once-over, but still with disordered piles of books and paper making it feel rather carelessly lived-in. Emil was sitting in one of the chairs at his desk, one hand cupping his damaged cheek and the other playing listlessly with a pen.  
“So why did you come?” he asked, not bothering to look up.  
“Lukas asked me to come with him last time,” Mathias explained. “He said it might do you good to talk to someone who understood. Then, of course, he seemed to change his mind rather quickly.”  
Emil smiled, the slant of his mouth making it appear cruel. “I think I told a little too much of the truth.” he said, self-satisfied.  
Mathias sighed deeply. “Emil,” he began, the terseness of his tone causing Emil to look up in mild surprise. “Tell me what Lukas did in the war. Tell me why I’m ‘a better man than him’.”  
Emil shook his head. “He’s got to tell you himself. Ask him, and watch him try to explain. See if he can. See if he doesn’t go on his knees and beg your forgiveness.”   
“It can’t have been that awful,” Mathias protested. “He’s your brother. He loves you. You know he wouldn’t come and see you if he didn’t care.”  
Emil clenched his fists, his face twisting with rage. “I hate him!” he shouted. “I hate him! He’s not my brother anymore, and he never will be. All he wants is for me to forgive him, and I swear I’ll never give him that satisfaction.” He began to cough violently, the spasms coming from deep in his diseased lungs, struggling to catch his breath between bursts.

Unable to help, Mathias felt uncomfortably involved in whatever conflict had divided the two brothers. One advantage of growing up without a family, he supposed, was that he had never had to experience that venomous hate which is particular to estranged siblings. Now he was seeing it, and he wanted to change the subject.  
“There was one thing Lukas was right about, though.” he said cautiously.  
Emil, red-faced and gasping, turned to glare at him. “What’s that, then?”  
“That I understand, when you seem to think he doesn’t. I understand what happened to you, and if you tell me, you won’t have to explain.”  
Emil shrugged. “Better than the doctors,” he said grudgingly. “Better than them and their ‘talking cure’. They don’t know what I’m talking about. They’ve read those bloody poets, and they think that’s as good as having seen everything,” He looked warily up at Mathias. “Just promise you won’t nod. People do that when they don’t understand.”  
“I promise.” Mathias reassured him, taking his place in the vacant chair.

Emil ran a tired hand through his hair. “Very well then,” he said. “Give me somewhere to begin.”  
“Tell me why you cough all the time,” Mathias suggested gently. “Tell me about the gas.”  
Emil retreated into his memories, beginning to shake with the bone-juddering force common to so many of those afflicted with shell-shock.   
“The alarm went – the rattle, you remember the rattle?”  
“I do.” Mathias murmured, remembering not to nod. He dared not say any more, knowing that if he interrupted the story, Emil would tell him no more. It was so rare for soldiers to have an unflinching, understanding observer – one who had been ‘over there’ as the saying went.  
Emil ran a distracted finger along one of his ridges of scarring. “Yes, the rattle. Awful noise. I remember. And we all went for our masks, but I was scared.” His eyes were wide and panicked, even now, when he was miles and years from the danger. “I had it and I dropped it. I dropped it! And I reached down for it, but it was too late. It was like breathing in fire, that gas. I was sick. I think I was. Maybe it was a bit of my lung. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see for days. We for I don’t know how long, everyone in a line, holding onto the one in front of you, all of us blind and every five minutes someone puking up God knows what kind of shit. I did too, all over me, all over my boots and clothes. Couldn’t smell it though. Couldn’t smell anything but chlorine.”

His expression darkened, made sinister by the unnatural set of his mouth. Mathias sat up a little straighter, and did not allow himself to look away. Emil continued.   
“We got to the hospital in the end. The nurses were alright, I suppose. They knew what they were doing. And then when the blindness lifted, the first thing I saw was my uniform, all neatly folded on the bedside table, my boots all polished. ‘I’m not fucking wearing that again,’ I told them. I said ‘I’m out of this bloody war. I’m going home.’ They just looked at me all sympathetic and told me I’d be back at the Front in a week. And I was. And that’s where I got this,” he said, pinching his patchwork bit of flesh between finger and thumb. “Bastard bit of shrapnel hit me. Wish I’d stayed fucking blind. Wish I couldn’t see myself, or anything. Wish I was fucking dead.”

Mathias looked at him, stunned, the visceral horror of the story causing his own scar to ache with sympathy. Before him sat a soldier – Emil. The boy’s accent had roughened, by accident or by design, and he swore casually. He had lost his public-school manners and become part of the rank and file, though his background must have been an inconvenient barrier to full acceptance by the rest of the men. Mathias had seen such things happen in his own regiment. And yet, all this aside, it was not a soldier who sat before him, but a trembling child, almost crying, his suffering eyes turned inwards to the memory of his blindness.  
“I understand.” said Mathias, and that was all that was required.

They sat in silence for a while, each lost in his own remembered hell but comforted, in a strange way, by the knowledge that the other had seen the same things.  
“You said you were wounded as well.” Emil said after several minutes, looking Mathias up and down as if expecting to catch sight of his scar.  
“I was.” Mathias replied.  
“Where?”  
“Just here.” Mathias traced the line of his wound.  
“Show me.”

It was such a simple request, if rather unusual, but Mathias immediately saw its significance. He had seen Emil’s scars – everyone who had seen Emil had, inevitably, seen his scars. Now, because it was only fair, Emil wanted to see his. Slowly, he removed his jacket, then unknotted his tie and let it fall to the floor in a whisper of imitation silk. With Emil’s eyes on him the whole time, he unbuttoned his shirt down to his stomach, then pulled back the halves of fabric so that the scar, six inches of warped, red-purple skin, was revealed.  
Emil looked at it carefully, tracing its line with his eyes. “Was it deep?” he asked.  
Mathias smiled grimly. “Like a fucking trench.” he said, slipping into the soldiers’ vernacular himself.  
Emil reached out and let his fingers brush against the scar. Mathias felt the shock of the touch all through him. “How did you survive?” Emil asked, withdrawing his hand and looking at Mathias in wonderment.  
“I was lucky.” Mathias replied.

Mathias was not attracted to Emil and, as far as he could tell, Emil was not attracted to him, but sitting there with his scar on show, he felt more naked than he had for years. The war had desexualised him, stripped him of emotions and desires, but here he felt vulnerable and open in a way he never had with any of his one-nighters. He had not felt anything comparable since he had slept with Lukas, and they had undressed each other and seen each other naked. He remembered the coldness of Lukas’s skin against his hands, his chest, his thighs, and remembered his fear that perhaps nothing, least of all him, could warm it. And then of course in the morning he had woken naked and, like Adam in the garden feeling the first flush of shame, had rushed to cover himself.

A few moments passed before he slowly began to button his shirt again, acutely aware of his own physicality. He was suddenly conscious of himself, and of the thoughts swirling through his mind.   
“Are you going now?” Emil asked.  
Mathias nodded, returning abruptly to the world of ordinary concerns. “I can’t miss the last train.”  
Emil stood up to shake his hand, a gesture of respect from one fighting man to another and Mathias, not expecting it, returned it awkwardly, dropping his tie to the floor again.  
“Don’t tell Lukas you were here today,” Emil told him. “It doesn’t concern him.”  
“I have to,” Mathias protested. “He’s your brother. He’s got a right to know.”  
Emil shook his head. “This is between us, between soldiers. If you want to tell him something, tell him this: that he doesn’t understand, that he can’t understand, and that he should stop trying to understand, for my sake and his own.”


	9. An Unpalatable Truth

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,   
Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.   
In the great hour of destiny they stand,   
Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.   
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win 5  
Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.   
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin   
They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives. 

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,   
And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, 10  
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,   
And mocked by hopeless longing to regain   
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,   
And going to the office in the train.  
-Dreamers, Siegfried Sassoon 

Here dead we lie because we did not choose  
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.  
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;  
But young men think it is, and we were young.  
-For the War Dead, A.E. Housman  
…

August 1920

Mathias lay perfectly still on his bed. It was six o’clock on Sunday evening, and the others had gone for their last drink of the weekend; he had brushed off their invitation with the promise to come along next time. The distant church bells rang out, calling people to Evensong; after a while, the melody changed to a single, melancholy, clanging chime, a final summons for any latecomers. He remembered Sundays in the orphanage, days of worship and subdued play. The hymns had always been good fun, his voice a pure treble that soared above the others’ mumbling, filling the little chapel as if it was a cathedral. Part of him had always hoped that one of the visiting benefactors might spot his talent and take him to live in one of the grand houses, as happened in books, but none of them had ever so much as asked his name. Perhaps, he thought wryly, he hadn’t been half as good as he remembered.

Idly, he ran a hand over his stomach, feeling the line of toughened skin. Even a day later, Emil’s touch still lingered there with the intensity of a kiss, and Mathias could still recall the brush of those cold fingertips. Something stirred in him at the thought of the press of lips against his skin. He half-thought of getting himself up into dreary arousal, then decided it was hardly worth the effort. A parade of past lovers drifted through his mind, encountered in various places – most from the war, a few from afterwards. You had to know where to look, how to ask. Nearly all were forgotten, or remembered piecemeal. He could recall a few names, where he had known them, a few hairstyles. He had tried not to look into their eyes, but sometimes he’d been unable to stop himself from searching for a glint of dark blue. Better to see it in the eyes of a one-nighter, he thought, than to find it glazed and dead on the battlefield.

At any rate, he had lost all his desire. He hardly minded if he never went through any of that again – he would not miss the fumbling to undress, the damp press of hands and bodies, the endless cigarettes, the bored sighs in the morning and half-hearted sniping at each other as he left. It was all so dull, when you reduced it to a sequence of movements. No, it was tenderness that still had the power to cut him. It was torture for him to see a young couple shyly holding hands, to glimpse a chaste kiss on the cheek or even simply to catch sight of two people smiling at each other across a table. He could live without sex. You could sleep with anyone, as he had proved so many times, and it would still feel the same, but love was rare – so rare, in fact, that he could not imagine feeling it for anyone but Lukas. And yet he had done everything with Lukas, and there was nothing left to imagine. It had been as profoundly unsatisfying as it would have been with anyone else, and there had existed between them… nothing special – a resistance, a mismatch, or at least a premature one. Too late now.

Silence swelled around him as the last peal of the bells faded and died. Pressing the side of his face into the pillow, he felt an overwhelming urge to cry. Through the glimmer of tears, he looked over at the small collection of objects on his bedside table – cigarettes and matches, his battered Dorian Gray, his cheap poetry book, a modest handful of coins and the previous day’s newspaper. There was nothing of himself. He had no photographs of himself or his parents, and he had lost his father’s language. He had no other books, no letters, and no medals from the war, though this last was perhaps a good thing – a reward for doing what he found so powerfully abhorrent would have served only to compound his misery.

Perhaps it was fitting that he had nothing that really belonged to him, he thought. At five, he had been the concern of the charity people, at fourteen he had been bound to his employers and four years after that he had become the property of the army. Now, at twenty-four, his life had still not begun. Having worn the uniforms of orphan, servant and soldier, he found that no one had ever really known him as himself. His father, maybe, but never as the man he now was. Gilbert, good friend as he was, knew him as no more than that – he knew nothing of his past, his preferences, or the darkness that raged in him every minute of his life. What memories kept Gilbert awake, if any, Mathias did not know – they, like so many other men, preferred to keep their friendship free from talk of war, and knowing that both of them had fought was as far as discussions needed to go. The only person he had truly laid himself open to was Lukas, but that had been years ago, before everything else – before he had marked himself with the marks of a hundred other people. It was only when he had talked to Emil that he had felt truly understood – when he had looked into his eyes and seen the answering gleam of anguish so like his own. But there was nothing Emil could do to help him. Emil could not even help himself.

Closing his eyes against the sight of his meagre possessions, Mathias thought of the people clustered in the small church as evening began to fall. He was not a believer, but he imagined himself among them, head bowed as the age-old words of prayer rang out, ancient and dignified. Lord have mercy, he begged. Lord have mercy.

…

Mathias spent much of the following evening in his room, exhausted not only by a day of heavy work in the heat but also by the effort of stopping himself from talking to Lukas. He had glimpsed him several times, book in hand as he explained something to one or other of the workers, but every time he had tried to approach him, Emil’s voice would echo in his mind and remind him that, for whatever reason, Lukas was not to be told of their encounter. Lukas, Emil had said to him, did not understand. He could not understand and, therefore, should stop trying to do so, Mathias thought to himself as he tried to make sense of it all. Whatever Lukas had done or not done, seen or not seen, it had made him, in Emil’s eyes, unfit to be a man and even less so to be his brother.

Still lost in inconclusive thoughts, it was with a heavy heart that Mathias made his way down to dinner, hoping to distract himself for a while with some good-natured chat and, if the landlady was in a charitable mood, a song or two on her precious gramophone, mounted like an ornament on the sideboard. The food always left something to be desired but Mathias, who had never known a mother’s cooking, hardly knew what he was missing, and besides, the music was good fun. It was ragtime, sometimes, or jazz – it was new, something the men liked to take their girls dancing to. Mathias wondered idly if he should take up singing again, then dismissed the idea. What did he know about music?

The mood in the dining room was, as he had hoped, convivial, with men chatting and laughing, spearing particularly suspect bits of food with their forks and holding them up for darkly humorous inspection. They were an amiable bunch, all things considered, though each had his moments of grim-faced silence or sleepless exhaustion. The others knew not to pry when such things happened. After all, going through someone’s memories only made you think of your own, and while for some it was cathartic, for others it was a violent torment.

Mathias took his seat, noting as he did so that there was a large bottle of wine in the middle of the table, replacing their usual water.  
“What’s the occasion?” he asked the man next to him, nodding in the direction of the bottle.   
The man smiled and jerked his fork towards Gilbert. “Ask the one who’s so kindly provided the evening’s pleasure.”  
Mathias looked over and saw Gilbert at the end of the table, laughing about something with a few others. “Gil!” he called out, his voice bright with the prospect of a cheerful evening. The wine no longer interested him, but its presence was a sign that the meal would be good fun. “Gil!” he said again. “Why the luxury? Win a bet down the boxing ring?”  
Gilbert broke off his conversation, grinning widely at Mathias. “No,” he replied. “Better than that,” He leaned across the table so that his voice would carry. “I’m getting married!”

There was nothing Mathias could say. He must, he supposed, have choked out some sort of congratulations, perhaps with a taut smile stretched over the bones of his face, but his exact words, and the reply, were lost to him. The world receded from him, as it sometimes did, and it was all he could do not to grip the table to steady himself. It was a feeling not unlike fainting; a sort of wateriness, an uncomfortable sense of insubstantiality. Gilbert was smiling like a soul that had escaped purgatory – as if, having done his penance he was finally free to pass into the upper realm. The others – the lost ones, the broken ones – crowded around him as if to bathe in his reflected glory. They too were souls – weak, indifferent souls drifting through the Fields of Asphodel – and they saw in Gilbert’s light-hearted extroversion everything that they were not, or at least what they no longer were. Mathias felt as if he had been punched. Other marriages had taken place on the periphery of his group of friends; this one struck at its heart.

“Who’s the lucky girl?” someone asked teasingly. There was a crack as the bottle was opened, and Mathias found himself desperate for a simple glass of water.  
“Lovely Liz,” Gilbert said proudly. “The brown-haired girl, the seamstress.”  
Mathias knew her, had seen Gilbert walking out with her once or twice. They couldn’t have been together for more than a month or two, but marriages made in the shadow of war were always hasty.  
The jokes continued as the wine began to flow. “Poor thing – why’s she marrying you? Did you ruin her?”  
“Not while her dad’s still around!” Gilbert said, laughing. “But I’m just thankful he’s accepting me as a son-in-law.”  
Someone asked when the wedding was; Gilbert replied that it would be in October or November, in a small church in his hometown and that they were all, of course, invited. His face was bright with the relief of having a future, his voice warm with love for the woman he was going to marry.

And Mathias, who saw in Gilbert’s success all his own depressing failures, watched the evening pass him by. Someone put on a record; the fashionably discordant music crashed in jarring waves against his ears. It was not the marriage that he envied – that, he knew, would never be his – but what it represented. Gilbert had rebuilt his life, and now he had someone to share it with. His war was, as far as possible, over, and Mathias could not help but wonder when the line would be crossed – when he himself could no longer claim the war as an excuse for not moving on, and when he would have to countenance the possibility that the problem was with him; some fatal flaw, some profound weakness in his character.

…

It was not until the following morning, after a restless night trying not to think about his future, that Mathias got the chance to talk to Gilbert on his own.  
“Sorry I was such a bore last night,” he said ruefully, as they dismounted and began to wheel their bicycles up the hill that had inspired the name of Lille Skarstind. “I really wasn’t feeling like myself. Congratulations on that whole business with the engagement, anyway. You’re a lucky man.” He managed to force a smile that held an echo of genuine pleasure. It would be unfair, he thought, if he refused to even try to be happy for his best friend.  
Gilbert returned the smile with a wide, sincere one of his own. “It’ll be you next,” he promised. “Just as long as you never introduce any potential wives to me – you don’t want them to know what they’re missing!”  
Mathias laughed in spite of himself, enjoying a rare moment of light-heartedness, then grew serious again. “No,” he said. “I can’t see myself as a married man.”  
“Oh, you’re not that ugly!” Gilbert teased him.  
Mathias just shook his head. “That aside, it doesn’t interest me at all.” he said resolutely, hoping to steer the conversation away from the rather sensitive subject of his love life.

Gilbert shrugged, pausing to adjust the angle of his hat against the sun. “You know, I would have said that myself a couple of years ago. I couldn’t see myself loving anyone – not properly, you know, not being married to someone. I didn’t think I’d be able to, with everything that went on,” He straightened up, his voice becoming brighter. “But Liz is something else. I really am lucky to have her, you know. She’s a lovely girl. I’ll do my best for her, I promised her that.”  
“I know you will,” Mathias reassured him. He smiled again. “I can tell you’ll be happy with her.”  
Gilbert nodded in acknowledgement. They walked a little way in friendly silence until, when they were about to reach the crest of the hill, Gilbert spoke again. “Mathias?”  
“Yes?”  
“I wanted to ask you if you’d be my best man at the wedding.” Gilbert said.  
Mathias turned to look at him, as if to reassure himself that it was not one of Gilbert’s customary jokes. “Me? Really?”  
“I think you’re the right man for the job,” Gilbert said. “You’re a good friend, better than anyone else I’ve met,” He smiled mischievously. “And what’s more, you can help me with the most important duty of all.”  
“Which is?” Mathias prompted him.  
Gilbert punched him playfully on the arm. “Getting absolutely blind drunk the night before!” he said, laughing.  
And Mathias, who had been profoundly moved by Gilbert’s request, did not let the smile fall from his face until the crumbling façade of Lille Skarstind, in all its painfully intimate familiarity, came into view.

…

Mathias worked slowly, lost in his melancholy imaginings of what things would be like for him once he no longer had Gilbert to keep him company in the lonely evenings. It was easy to imagine him as a married man, loyal and uxorious, and then later as a father. Alright for some, Mathias thought to himself, unable to keep a strain of bitterness out of the words. He had been to several weddings of men he considered his friends, and after a while they all seemed the same – the words of the ceremony, the dresses, the rings slipped on to shaking fingers. The restrained parties afterwards were always full of speeches and laboured jokes, lacklustre food and dances where the girls would always press a little too close to him and look at him with the hard gleam of desire, though softened a little by sad hope, in their eyes. There were not enough men to go around, and Mathias was handsome, single and – on the face of it – relatively sane. And yet he recoiled from the idea in both mind and body, and after every dance, he would seek out another girl, and another, until it was clear to all of them that none had left a lasting impression on him. 

The couples themselves often seemed mismatched – hasty pairings sealed in law before either party could regret their decision. “Might as well,” the newly-engaged men would say into their glasses of beer. “Might as well. She’s a nice girl, and it’s high time I was married.” The faster a girl was rescued from the spinsterhood that, with the dearth of men, could be permanent, the happier she was – at least, until the reality of marriage as something lifelong set in. Two or three months of knowing each other and a couple would be committed. To an observer, it seemed like a mad thing to do and yet, Mathias reflected, he and Lukas had done something rather similar themselves – only in their case, their actions had not forced them together but split them apart, and all that had come later had only served to widen the cracks.

Mathias leaned closer to the carving that he was chiselling back into its former pattern, swearing as his lack of concentration caused yet another careless error. His visit to Emil weighed heavily on his conscience, and it brought another unwelcome dimension to his relationship with Lukas. He did not know which should take precedence – his moral discomfort at keeping a secret which did not really belong to him, or Emil’s demand that the meeting remain something between the two of them. If he was truly honest with himself, his visit had been at least partly for the purpose of finding out what Lukas was hiding. And Emil had told him to ask him himself.

Ask him, and watch him try to explain. See if he can. See if he doesn’t go on his knees and beg your forgiveness

It was then that his great idea came to him – the idea that, years later, he would see was the thing that led to best and worst moments of his life. He would go and seek out Lukas, and gain entry to the room that he had last set foot in six years before and then, once there, he would ask him what he had done in the war. 

…

Mathias knew that he would find Lukas in his bedroom. There was nowhere else for him to be, for the simple reason that there was no other room in the house that was habitable. Talking to the other workers, Mathias had heard of attic ceilings pierced by leaks, parlour walls thickly patterned with mould and the echoing, empty ballroom, its cracked and dusty mirrors like frosted lakes. With his own eyes, he had seen crate after crate of damp-spotted books brought from the library, destined to be sold or, where the damage was too severe, thrown away. As he stood outside Lukas’s room, he tried to summon up the music he had heard, faintly, through the door that night when he had first paused there. He could not remember a note of it, but its faded intensity rose in him and moved him and he was quite certain that, if he heard it now, a single strain of the melody would bring him to his knees. He knocked on the door.

“Lukas,” he said simply. “Please let me come in.”  
He had been expecting to be met with silence, or to have to plead with him, and so it was a surprise when, without a moment’s argument, Lukas opened the door.  
“I know you went to see Emil,” he said, leaning against the doorframe. He looked tired, and his shirt was thin with washing, and appeared grey against the whiteness of his skin. “I went on Sunday, and one of the nurses told me. She said you seemed like a nice lad from what she saw of you. Said Emil was a lot happier that evening.”  
Mathias nodded, strangely relieved at not having to keep his secret any longer. “I did go.” he replied, refusing to make it sound like a confession. He was convinced that he had been right to visit.  
Lukas looked up at him as though betrayed. “Why?” he asked.  
“For the reason you wanted me to see him in the first place,” Mathias said. “To give him the chance to talk to someone who understands what happened.”  
“And you weren’t going to tell me?”

Mathias felt like crying with the frustration of it all. What a bloody mess he’d got himself into. How had he and Lukas become so intimately interwoven into each other’s lives? So much the better if they’d met and not really known each other and drifted apart to be mutually forgotten. Too late. Too late. Too late for everything now.  
“I was about to,” he said. “I wanted you to know. I was never going to keep it from you – I just knew he’d never speak freely if you were there.”  
“What did he say to you?” Lukas asked, almost desperate, as if hoping to hear words of forgiveness.  
“He said I should ask you what you did in the war.”  
“Oh God.” Lukas said softly, his hand tightening around the edge of the door.  
“Will you tell me?” Mathias asked. “After all that’s happened to us, will you tell me?”  
Lukas sighed. “Come in, then.” he said at last.

They sat on Lukas’s bed, but not together, and only because there was nowhere else to sit. The desk and chair were piled high with rescued books, most of the floor taken up by a tin bath and washstand. The bed itself was much at the same. Mathias looked at Lukas, and thought of those beautiful lips, warm where the rest of him was cold, pressed against his. He wished they could have their time again to do things properly, and he wondered what it was that Lukas was remembering.

He let his eyes stray to the three photograph frames on the bedside table. There was one of Lukas and Emil as children, dressed in identical sailor outfits, the older brother with a protective arm around the younger. From the second frame, Mathias’s own face smiled out at him, and he felt the unpleasant jolt of unexpected familiarity. His younger self was smiling the smile of a boy who had all the world spread out before him, and Mathias reflected that the photograph showed him on the last day of his innocence. Something ached in him at the thought of Lukas keeping the picture all through the years of silence, and even now, in his time of disappointment and heartbreak, and he hastily looked away.

The third frame held a photograph of around twenty young men with distant, restrained smiles on their faces. They were the class of 1914 at Lord Rochester’s School for Boys – the doomed legion, smiling out into the tranquil English summer, all eighteen and destined for university or high society. They could not have known it then, that day in June, but the future they were smiling at held Ypres and Arras and the Somme; it held death for a good half of them and injury for most of the others. He spotted Lukas sitting at the front with the rest of the short ones, a slight but nonetheless uncharacteristic smile on his lips. Mathias was almost overcome by the sight of them – all those boys, those happy boys, who knew nothing of what was so soon to befall them. He both hated and envied them for their blissful ignorance. How could there have been a time when the war was still in the future? When would there ever be a time when it was truly in the past? He looked again at their smiles and it was that joy, so searingly pure and so achingly irreplaceable, that gave him the courage he needed to make his request.

“Lukas,” he said. “Please, tell me what you did.”  
Lukas began his story. “We used to be rich, you know,” he said. “Years ago, before I was born. We used to have titles – we were earls, then viscounts, then nothing at all,” He glanced around his shabby room, as if unable to believe the grandeur of his own history. “This house was built in 1705. It was a gift from Prince George, husband of Queen Anne, to my ancestor, Sigve Bondevik, who was one of his most trusted friends and advisers.”  
Mathias was becoming impatient with the history lesson. “This has nothing to do with anything!” he said sharply.  
Lukas cast him an irritated glance, but seemed to know that he was in no position to rebuke him. “My relations did not have the greatest reproductive success,” he continued. “Sigve’s first son had only daughters, and his second son predeceased his third,” He sighed. “I’m afraid that set something of a precedent. For years, the house and title, and then eventually just the house, passed to poorer and more distant relatives. Between 1798 and 1815, three brothers inherited the house and then died in battle without having had sons – one at the Nile, one at Trafalgar and one at Waterloo. It was with the death of the last of these that my great-great-grandfather inherited the house.”

Mathias shifted restlessly, but said nothing. He was almost trembling with nerves at the thought of what secret Lukas would divulge.  
“He was of the poorest branch of the family,” Lukas went on. “And also the last, since all the others had died off or left only daughters. Emil and I are the last of the Bondeviks, here or in Norway, and so I am sure you can appreciate the dilemma which faced us at the outbreak of war.”  
Mathias felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to cover his ears, to cry out that he had changed his mind and wished to hear no more of the story. Instead, he simply clenched his hands into nervous fists and stared at the floor, knowing that, for his own sanity, he would have to follow the story to its conclusion.

“Emil asked me if I would enlist,” Lukas said, emotion beginning to seep into his measured voice. “I said I would not; I said that the war would be over in a few months and besides, I was going to university. I thought I was right – even when you volunteered, I thought I was still right. I could not see myself as a soldier but you… You seemed just the sort they were looking for. You seemed brave and strong, and all the things I wasn’t.”  
“I’m not brave,” Mathias said. “I went because it seemed right.”  
Lukas sighed softly. “At any rate, I went up to Cambridge, as planned, and I found that, within my first term, a good half of the students had signed up. And still I thought I was right – I thought it was foolish to dash off to war with half a degree and no clear idea of when it would all end. I said I would go if I was conscripted, which at that point did not yet seem like a certainty. I saw Emil that Christmas and he said that he was ashamed. He said that, out of all his friends, he was the only one whose brother was not in the army,” He paused, and Mathias looked up to see the glint of tears in his dull blue eyes. “He said he was ashamed of me, and that I was not the sort of brother he wanted. I suppose it must have been about three months after that that my mother wrote to me to tell me that he had run away from school and enlisted.”

“So he was sixteen?” Mathias asked.  
Lukas nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. “A year went by,” he continued. “Emil wrote to us once in a while, but never came home on leave. And then conscription came in, and I was faced with the dilemma I mentioned earlier. Clearly, the most moral thing to do was to follow the rules and fight, but Emil was in the army, and if both of us were killed then our family line would be gone forever. On the other hand, if I did not go, then one of us would be guaranteed to survive and pass on the family name. My mother still hoped that I would marry, you see. If she had lived, she would certainly have procured a wife for me.”  
“And so what happened?” Mathias asked, faint with the prospect of hearing the truth.  
“My father was a kind man,” Lukas said. “He died when I was ten years old, but my mother knew of several friends, still living, to whom he had given gifts. In some ways, his generosity deepened our poverty, but that is by the by. He had some contacts in the army, and so my mother and I called in a few favours. Strings were pulled, and in the end I was able to secure myself a job at headquarters.”  
“So you never went to France?”  
“I did.”  
“But you did not fight?”  
“I did not.”

Mathias truly did not know what to say. At that moment, the power of speech was beyond him. He had so hoped to be mistaken, hoped that Emil’s words could be twisted to mean that Lukas had never been injured, or never won a medal, but now that he thought about it, they could only have meant one thing – what Lukas had just told him. He looked at Lukas – perfect, incorruptible, his features polished with the faint hauteur of noble birth – and he could not imagine him old. He couldn’t imagine him at forty, or indeed any older than he was now. And what a tragic case of life imitating art, he thought – for, if Lukas was Dorian Gray, then Emil was his portrait.

Emil, he thought despairingly – Emil, who hid and was hidden, who wore the sins of his brother in his ravaged face and who was the first to know Lukas’s secret and the last to forgive him. What had the first profaning of the portrait been? A small thing, a twist of cruelty in those perfect lips, an exquisitely obscene fault. But Lukas was not cruel. No one could feel that amount of remorse and still be cruel. The shame! The shame! The suffering, suffering guilt of it all!

And then, when the sin had begun to weigh too heavy on his soul, Dorian had crept upstairs and stabbed the dreadful painting, only to kill… himself. But death solved nothing – nothing at all. Mathias knew that and yet, sometimes, a quieter darkness beckoned from the depths of his emotional hell. Emil was dying – would be gone soon enough – and Mathias wondered whether Lukas would follow him, deliberately or in good time, or whether he would precede him.

“I’m terribly sorry.” Lukas said.  
Mathias, his mind drifting apart from the situation, was suddenly struck by how strange it was that you would use the exact same words if you knocked into a stranger in the street. There had to be something stronger. Tears, perhaps, but there was something so pathetic about crying in the middle of an apology and, had Lukas done so, Mathias would have turned from him.

“It’s hard to talk to you when you don’t understand.” Mathias replied eventually.  
Lukas shifted awkwardly, and Mathias could tell that he had been hoping for absolution, and that he was disappointed and – quite unreasonably – hurt by his refusal to give it to him. Mathias found that he was not in the mood to forgive.  
“What I don’t see,” Lukas said, his voice hollow and brittle from the effort of not crying. “Is why, if you all want to forget, you soldiers have such hate for those who do not remember. Had we lived fifty years ago, we would not have had to fight. Have I missed some vital part of the human experience by not doing so?”  
“You’ve alienated yourself from the men of your generation,” Mathias replied. “Having nothing to remember is very different from having everything to forget. Every Armistice Day, you will stand in silence, and although you will know why, you will not hear the dead screaming in your mind. You will hear about men who have killed themselves to escape their memories, and although you will feel pity, your inexperience will mean that you cannot feel compassion. And you will buy your poppy every year, and wear it to show that you remember the sacrifice, but you will not remember the real poppies that, as a friend I had and lost once said, are like beads of blood against the naked earth.”  
Mathias felt slightly dazed. The words that he had just spoken did not feel like his own; the eloquence, certainly, was not his. He felt like a sort of prophet; he had been momentarily blessed with the articulacy born out of conviction that lucky men experience once or twice in their lives.

Lukas looked at him, confused, his face guilty and vulnerable, as if he was only now coming to realise the vastness of the disparity between them, and they were silent.  
“I’m sorry.” Lukas said again, and all at once, Mathias was angry.  
“In the army,” he replied. “You would have been shot dead for cowardice.”  
“I know,” Lukas said. “I wish I had been.”

There was nothing more to say, and so Mathias stood up to leave. Lukas made no move to stop him, and he felt no compunction as he walked down the stairs and out of the house. After all, he thought, it wasn’t the first time he had left Lukas crying.

…

Mathias sat, furious and drunk, at the bar of his local ‘queer pub’, staring into his empty glass. His mind was full of rage and darkness, memories stirred up by Lukas’s confession. How could he have loved him? How could he love him now, with all that separated them? Stupid, stupid, stupid. The single volley of a firing squad, sharp in the silence of the dawn, sounded in his memory. Should have been Lukas, what with all he’d just said. His thoughts rattled in his head, erratic. Don’t think about it don’t fucking think about it don’t think about the place above his heart that you kissed once don’t think about it all bloody and torn don’t do it you’ll go mad it’s not real it didn’t happen he’s still alive and he doesn’t deserve to be. He wasn’t there he wasn’t there he doesn’t know he can’t know he can’t understand. His glass was still empty.

The young man next to him, who had been giving him the eye since he’d got there, gave him a nudge.  
“Fancy another?” he asked. His voice was coquettish and effete, like a cloud of stale perfume.  
Mathias shrugged, then allowed himself to be bought a drink, unsure of who was submitting to whom with such an act. His drink arrived, and he forced it down his throat, though it was disgusting to him as the thought of drinking blood. The man moved closer to him, and Mathias felt the unmistakeable brush of a hand against his thigh.  
“Want to go somewhere after?” Mathias asked the young man. “We can’t go back to mine, but I know a few places.” He was attractive enough, pretty but not really beautiful, but he would do for the moment. He had finally abandoned all hope of loving Lukas, and, although he didn’t particularly want the sex he was asking for, he felt that if he could just go through one more awful entanglement, he could finally eradicate every trace of his attraction to Lukas.

He was drunk, and tired, and disappointed, and such was his sense of utter defeat that, when the young man produced a police badge and pair of handcuffs and told him that he was under arrest for attempted buggery, he could hardly bring himself to care at all.


	10. My Love, My Love

I never saw a man who looked  
With such a wistful eye  
Upon that little tent of blue  
Which prisoners call the sky,  
And at every drifting cloud that went  
With sails of silver by.

I walked, with other souls in pain,  
Within another ring,  
And was wondering if the man had done  
A great or little thing,  
When a voice behind me whispered low,  
"That fellow's got to swing."

\- The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal… To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.  
\- De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

…

September 1920

There were footsteps in the corridor, resolving and dissolving as they approached and passed by without halt or hesitation. A door slammed with a metallic clank; someone, somewhere, was shouting. Mathias sat on his bed and stared at the wall, tracing with his eyes the tributaries and deltas of the rivers of cracks that spilled across it. It was Sunday, and the prisoners had no work on Sunday. This fact, both an observance of the Lord’s Day and a small concession to mercy, brought him neither pleasure nor relief. He would have preferred to pick oakum until his fingers bled. He would have preferred almost anything to this dreary greyness, and this silence. He thrived on contact with people; here, alone, he was withering like a plant locked in a cupboard. For the second time in his life, he had been photographed, forced to clutch the board on which were scrawled his name, number and crime. Two photographs, two labels. Private Mathias Køhler, British soldier. Mathias Køhler, no. 25371, attempted buggery.

There were footsteps again, pausing in front of his cell, and then, before he had time to respond, a tremendous rattling of keys and bolts. Conditioned to be nervous of such things, he jumped to his feet.  
The door swung open to reveal the coarse, humourless features of one of the guards. “Visitor for you, Køhler,” he said. “A friend, or so he said.” He gave a cruel smile, and Mathias felt his face burn with humiliation. The nature of his crime was common knowledge in the prison.  
“Did he leave a name?” he asked.  
The guard shrugged. “All I know is someone’s there. Whether you want to see him or not, he certainly wants to see you.”

It was with great apprehension that Mathias allowed himself to be led down the corridor, which was built of lead-grey stone and striped with thick reinforcing bands of dark, coppery metal. High above him, two metal staircases twisted like serpentine skeletons, leading up to more cells. It was an awful place to be, a painful and abrupt shrinking of his world to cell, dining hall, workroom and exercise yard, the only part of the prison that was open to the air. For a week now, the sky had been an opaque mass of clouds, and when he looked up, it was just like being contained under yet another roof. A week. He had been here for just over a week, and already the confinement was making him go mad again.

After a minute or two, they came to the door that led to the visiting room. It was miserably austere, with windows separating the prisoners from their visitors. There were all sorts there – some wives quietly weeping, couples having screaming arguments through the glass, children in their Sunday best with their hands pressed up to the panes. All were anxious, glancing up at the clock to see when the allotted hour for visits – two until three in the afternoon – would be over for another week. Mathias anxiously scanned the room to see who had come for him, and he would have been lying if he had said that he did not feel a guilty stab of disappointment on seeing that his visitor was not Lukas but Gilbert. Lukas would have been far more difficult to talk to, yes, but at least he had some understanding of the circumstances that might lead to the arrest of a sinner such as him. Gilbert would need things explained to him, and once that had happened, he would feel – justifiably – that he had been lied to. What was more – and here was that awful, illogical magnetism again – he wanted to see Lukas again, and tell him the last few drops of truth that still remained to him. He wanted to tell him the truth of all his infidelities and that, despite his efforts to forget, he had never quite been able to stop loving him. But that was irrelevant. Gilbert was here, and Mathias knew that, really, he should be thankful that anyone had come to see him at all.

“Well.” said Gilbert plainly as Mathias sat down opposite him, on the other side of the window. There was a small hole to talk into, but they both had to stoop uncomfortably to reach it.  
“Well.” Mathias replied, lost for words.  
“I never knew you were queer.” Gilbert said after a silence that seemed to last forever.  
Mathias shrugged. “I don’t make a show of it.” he replied.  
“You could have told me, you know.” Gilbert said, looking a little put out.  
Mathias gave an exasperated sigh. “Gil,” he replied patiently. “I just got arrested for propositioning someone who was openly flirting with me – forgive me if I’m a little slow to trust when it comes to these things.”  
Chastened, Gilbert let his gaze drop. “I saw you in the paper,” he mumbled. “The local one. That’s how I knew you were here.”

Ah, Mathias thought grimly. The humiliation, crushing and total. Put a man’s secrets on parade. Brand the pages with the capital letters of his shame. It was lasciviousness thinly and inadequately disguised as journalism; prurience unconvincingly masquerading as moral horror.  
“Always knew I’d be famous.” he said flatly.  
Gilbert looked up at him again. “It said you were in for ‘attempted buggery’,” he said. “What did you do to him?”  
Mathias shrugged, remembering his last and fatal drunkenness. A blade of fury whipped through his mind. “Nothing,” he replied, his voice rough with anger. “I asked him, that’s all. Never even touched him. He touched me, as it happens. That’s why I asked him. That’s why I’m in here,” He paused as something occurred to him. “Sorry about the wedding, by the way.” he added in a softer voice.  
Gilbert managed a half-smile. “Never mind all that,” he said. “We’ll toast you,” He leaned back in his chair. “Now I see why you didn’t want to get married.”  
“Might not have been such a bad idea after all.” Mathias replied, trying not to think about what he would be missing. He was guilty, and would be found to be so when he was tried, and his sentence stretched before him, unremittingly bleak.

“I’ll be back when I can,” Gilbert said, changing the subject with a conscious effort to be cheerful. “Anything you want me to bring you?”  
Mathias shook his head. “Just pass on a message,” he said. “To Lukas.”  
Gilbert frowned, confused. “Who?”  
“Mr Bondevik,” Mathias explained. “Up at Lille Skarstind. Tell him I’m here. He’ll come if you tell him that.”  
Gilbert’s frown deepened. “Do you know him?” he asked, beginning to guess.  
“Carnally,” Mathias replied. “Once, and too early, and for too short a time, but there it is.”  
And Gilbert, in whose changing expression Mathias could see the battle between public morals and private friendship, nodded wordlessly and then, in a voice whose weakness could not be denied, promised that he would do as he had been asked.

…

The days passed. Mathias drifted from cell to dining hall to workroom, head down, staying out of trouble. Each day the prisoners had an hour outdoors, traipsing around the exercise yard in enforced silence. They were caged, subdued; some of them could not even bring themselves to raise their eyes from the ground. At night, he lay awake and thought of the war, or of Lukas, or of nothing at all. If he was lucky, he slept; if not, there were hours to while away in regrets until morning came and the whole wretched routine began again. 

He could, he supposed, have asked Gilbert to bring him his books, but he no longer wanted to read them. The poetry no longer brought him anything but pain; the spell that Dorian Gray had cast over him had been broken; the book held no more pleasure for him. It was useless now – there was only so much one could say about moral degradation, only so many times beauty could be revealed to be an illusion, only so nay times one could witness Dorian recoiling in horror from his own sins.

He had owned the book for eight years, from his slow discovery of who he was all through his mad summer’s infatuation with Lukas. In the trenches, he had reread the scenes of glittering beauty and allowed himself to be transported; in the hospital, his abdomen tight and aching with stitches, he had found comfortingly familiar amusement in Sir Henry’s amoral aphorisms. Later, and indeed until recently, he had seen in Dorian’s anguish echoes of himself and, like him, had tried to distract himself form the thoughts and memories that he could not discuss even with those who shared them. The ink of the book flowed in his blood; there were long passages burnt, indelibly, into the fibres of his brain – the beauty of them, the suffering, the shame!

But no longer. There was nothing more that the book could give him. There was nothing that literature in general, despite all its incomparable richness, could offer him, and that was a sentiment shared by many young men who saw in the neat plots and reliable characters of novels nothing to reflect the chaos. There were new books, in which there was no God and no hope and the narrative was splintered and disordered, for not even time was immune to clamour and confusion of a world after war. People no longer sought comfort from books – in this cynical age, they wanted the truth.

And so he had nothing to read, and read nothing. Instead, he spent all that week charting the passage of time on the slow, heavy clocks that marked off with dragging ticks the sentence that awaited him. But that week, for once, he was not thinking of release, but rather of whether, come two o’clock on Sunday afternoon, there would be a knock on his cell door.

Mathias had once, at the age of seven or eight, been involved in a fight with three or four other boys. The cause of the dispute had long ago vanished from his memory; the result had been his three remaining milk teeth being knocked loose and him being summoned to explain himself to see the stern matron. She had asked which of them had started it, and he could still remember the cruel smile on the face of one of the other boys as he had – truthfully – denounced him. His anger at being caught had been almost eclipsed by the power that, in that moment, his opponent had exercised over him. From that moment on, Mathias had vowed always to tell his own truth. He knew that, in the trial, every sordid detail of his lifestyle would be raised as evidence against him, and he did not wish for anyone to have the power that that boy had had over him ever again. There would be nothing on show that he had not confessed to himself and, since he had no desire to burden Gilbert, who was so bravely trying to build a life on the murky foundations of the past, with the shameful truth of his promiscuity, the only confidant left to him was Lukas.

The knock came. Same time, same guard, same announcement.  
“Visitor for you, Køhler.” he said.  
“Same as last time?” Mathias asked, his mind oddly calm. At the edges raged doubt and the residual anger that he knew would never leave him, but at the centre was the brightness of peace, like a Turner painting.  
“Different.”  
“Give a name?”  
“Only yours.”  
Mathias knew then, as he had not quite hoped, that it was Lukas. If it was not Gilbert, then it could not be anyone but Lukas. There was simply no one else in all four corners of the globe who cared enough to see him.

…

They did not speak straightaway. Silently, as if wary of overstepping some boundary, Lukas watched as Mathias sat down in across from him, and Mathias could hardly bear to meet his eyes. He could not have said which of them was more ashamed of himself, and nor could he have said which of them had more reason to be so.  
“Your friend told me you were here.” Lukas said eventually, his eyes on where his hands were folded nervously in his lap.  
“I wanted to you to know,” Mathias admitted. “I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d care.”  
“He told me the reason,” Lukas continued. “He said I was the type who’d understand.”  
“I’m sorry.” Mathias said weakly. Excuses frothed up in his mind. He could have twisted the knife; he could have said that only soldiers could understand. Instead, he let the words stand naked and inadequate. He remembered Lukas’s own apology and wondered which of them had done the worse thing.  
“Tell me truthfully,” Lukas said. “How many others?”  
Mathias could see that he was hurt, and wondered for a moment if he should lie, then imagined Lukas in the public gallery as all the details of his sordid promiscuity were declaimed and recorded. Tell your own truth, he said to himself.  
“Hundreds,” he said, hating himself. “I don’t know how many. Too many, I suppose. I’m sorry. But I only propositioned this one, I swear.”

“Ah.” was all Lukas said, as if Mathias had just explained something mildly confusing to him. He was composed; Mathias searched his face for an echo of his thoughts and found nothing. He was afraid, Mathias thought, of complaining; he knew that his ignoble wartime activities could be used against him at any time.  
“I regret it now.” Mathias mumbled.  
Lukas cast a glance out of the window at the thick wall that encircled the prisoners’ world. “I suppose you must.” he remarked, and Mathias caught a glimpse of a sardonic wit that he had, perhaps, honed with his schoolfriends so many years before.  
Mathias made a gesture that encompassed the whole room. “This isn’t the reason.” he told him. Lukas nodded, acknowledging that something had been said. The ghost of a feeling rippled across his face – sorrow, disappointment.

“I could have got married, you know,” Lukas said after a while. “A second daughter, maybe, with a bit of money. It might have solved a few problems.”  
“But you didn’t.” Mathias finished for him.  
“I was waiting.”  
“For me?”  
“For you.” Lukas confirmed.  
“Even when you thought I was dead?” Mathias was flooded with abject shame. His one-nighters swarmed around him – the gleam of dark hair under an electric light; an archipelago of birthmarks stamped on a shoulder; a blunt white scar across a hand. And Lukas stood away from them, apart from them – someone better, in spite of everything; the one person to whom, for better or worse, he had returned again and again.  
“Even then,” Lukas replied emphatically. “Because I decided that if I could not have you, I would have no one else.”  
“So you loved me?”  
“I did.”  
“And now?”  
“Yes.”

It was enough; it was confirmation. Mathias felt the memories of his affairs crowd closer – the heavy taste of wine, the dark sweetness of pomade. Their hands clung to him, each one claiming him. He imagined what it would be like to make a life with Lukas – if it would be possible, with all that they knew about each other. He could picture the nightmares, the sudden flares of anger and endless evenings spent confessing all his stories and Lukas nodding and smiling sympathetically in the thin, strained way of the alienated listener. Could they do it? Could they ever have done it? He knew that there were marriages beginning to collapse because the wives could not understand what their husbands had gone through. Why would he and Lukas be any different? And what about Emil? Would he come to live with them, or would he choose or be forced to remain where he was, locked in the secrecy of his own madness?

It was a while before either of them said anything. The minutes ticked by, spilling, flooding past before Mathias could even mark their passing. Someone shouted, then lowered their voice again, the sound becoming lost in the babble of conversation, harmony ducking below melody. He looked at Lukas and could not bear not to touch him; the glass, at that moment, was the worst torment of his incarceration. How beautiful it would be to have him in his arms again – a simple, chaste embrace. Could he forgive him? He must, for his own fragile sanity. But what about Emil? Emil, who had lost his mind and his beauty and the prospect of a future – what about him? Perhaps, if Mathias were to forgive Lukas, Emil would see it as a betrayal. Perhaps it was. 

“You’re in here because of me, aren’t you?” Lukas said.  
Mathias struggled to reply. The memory of his drunkenness and the darkness of his thoughts came rushing back to him. He had felt betrayed, that was it. Lukas had fallen ungracefully from the pedestal he had so long occupied in his mind – useless, emasculated, his beauty a cruel joke at his generation’s expense. Yes, he had been truly angry then, unable to reconcile what he still felt for Lukas with what he knew about him. He remembered his tired proposition, his feeble summoning-up of energy. He remembered the cold bite of the cuffs around his wrists and the dullness of his mind, the dullness of everything, like the grey of the sea under clouds. Lukas did not understand what bound all other men together, and perhaps that was punishment enough. And yet, Mathias still saw the good in him. Lukas, it was true, had never killed a man. He had never marched for hours, blind with exhaustion, through earth that was moist and thick with blood. He had never cleaned another man’s viscera off his bayonet and thrown the handkerchief away as if he had no more than coughed into it. But he regretted it – that was the crux of it. He did not glory in his escape, and he did not believe himself to be right in having not fought. No, what he had failed to do would stay with him all his life, just as what Mathias had done would stay with him. And, Mathias thought, in what strange world was it better to have killed a man than not to have done so? By what twisted moral code was such a thing acceptable?

In the end, he did not answer Lukas directly. “I was so bloody stupid,” he said. “I think we both were, in all that we did.” It was a relief to speak honestly.  
Lukas inclined his head, agreeing. “We were,” he replied softly. “Too late now, really, for everything.”  
Mathias shrugged. “We’re still young.”  
“Are we?”  
He shrugged again. “We’re alive,” he said. “That’s enough for me.”  
“And Emil?”  
Mathias paused for a moment. “Emil,” he said. “Like so many others, is one of the great tragedies of the war.”

A child began to cry; a prisoner’s mother, dressed in the resolute grey of an older woman, leaned in to whisper something to her son. The clock ticked; two sisters in their early twenties bade goodbye to their brother and left, their narrow hips shown off by the new style of dress. The fashion was daring and without precedent, belonging to the tabula rasa world of jazz and abstract painting and cryptic poetry. 

“Have you read De Profundis?” Lukas asked.  
A memory flared – ancient, buried. It came to Mathias with the searing, stinging brightness of the sun that day under the tree. The dull thwack of a cricket ball being thrown and caught; the mist of condensation on the glasses he was carrying; Lukas his cheeks pink with the sun, reading. They’d been eighteen. What had they known at eighteen?  
“I never learnt Latin.” Mathias said and, seeing Lukas’s sorrowful half-smile and the eyes that were suddenly damp with the pain of remembered innocence, knew that he too remembered the old, old words.  
“It’s in English,” Lukas replied, a twist of tearful laughter in his voice. “It’s only the title that’s in Latin.”  
“I never get the bloody language right.” Mathias said with a shrug, and Lukas smiled, not without sadness, at the memory. Yes, yes, he knew it well. It was one of their few fragments of happiness together from that lost idyll, England’s Eden, that was the world before war – before they had done or not done all those things that they now so regretted. Summer 1914, they both knew, and that narrow column of luxurious years that had led up to it, would never again be viewed in isolation – never would people be able to think of tea and cricket and waltzes without the foreshadowing lying thick over the unblemished minds of the young men who had dressed in boater hats and blazers and known nothing of the world.

How they had changed, Mathias thought, since that summer. Emil, for instance – what he wouldn’t give to have back that arrogant, chain-smoking boy. How he would cherish that lofty confidence, that intact spirit. Lukas – how he would have loved him to be as sinless as he had first appeared, and to have again the madness of young men’s infatuation. As for himself, he wished only for silence and freedom from thought and – achingly – for Lukas.

It was some time before Mathias realised that neither of them was saying anything. Time was relative; as long as one remained unconscious of it, it would flow past, dimming the brightness of memories and silencing the voices of the dead. Or at least he hoped it would, one day.  
“I’ll bring it to you if you like.” said Lukas.  
“The book.”  
Mathias made a non-committal face. “What’s it about?”  
“It’s a letter of sorts,” Lukas explained. “Oscar Wilde wrote it when he was in prison. The title means ‘from the depths’.”  
“Just the thing to distract me.” Mathias said bitterly. “Who’s it written to?”

Lukas sighed, his expression worn out by the misery of the two men he loved. He had another five years of beauty in him, Mathias guessed – seven or eight at most. That was the tragedy of pretty boys – so captivating, yet so ultimately ephemeral, like the trilling of a treble voice, unaccompanied, rising to Heaven by its own strength.  
“A lover,” Lukas said eventually. “Bosie Douglas. The boy was terribly cruel to him, and the poor man worshipped him until the end. He was the love of his life, and the ruin of him.”  
“I see.” Mathias replied, not knowing what else to say.  
“You like Wilde, don’t you?” Lukas continued. “Mr Kirkland said once that he thought you must be clever, since you always had your nose in Dorian Gray.”  
“I’ve only read three books in my life,” Mathias muttered, reddening slightly at Arthur’s unmerited compliment. “You know it?”  
Lukas nodded. “I’ve read it twice,” he said – softly, tearfully. “It’s a beautiful book.”

Mathias wanted to ask what, if anything, Lukas saw of himself in Dorian, but that would be painful, and it was coming up to quarter to three, and there were more concrete matters to discuss.  
Lukas too seemed to have picked up on the urgency. “When’s the trial?” he asked, glancing up at the clock.  
“Three weeks from tomorrow.” Mathias replied, already terrified. His shabby defence was no excuse. His drunkenness was no excuse – rather, in the eyes of the court, it was further proof of his immorality.  
Lukas leaned forward a little. “Have you got a solicitor?” he asked – quietly, as though it were a secret.  
Mathias shook his head. “Wouldn’t do me any good,” he replied. “I’m guilty, Lukas. I did it. I’ll get two years, no question.”  
“I have money,” Lukas insisted. “The money I got for my war work. I haven’t touched it. It’s blood money. I don’t want it.”  
“No!” said Mathias vehemently. “I don’t deserve it.”  
“Why not?”

Mathias sighed, a sound like death, like the end of the world. “I was unfaithful to you,” he said. “You waited for me, and I never even sent you a letter.”  
“I did far, far worse,” Lukas replied. “Let me do this for you. If you have a good solicitor, you might be able to get a few months knocked off your sentence.”  
“No,” Mathias repeated. “I’m disgraced enough without lying in court. Give the money to one of those soldiers’ charities or something of the sort. Don’t waste it on me.”  
“Are you sure?” Lukas asked, disbelieving. He fiddled with the place on his shirt where a button had fallen off and not been replaced.  
“I am.” Mathias confirmed.

Morally, he wondered, which one of them would society be quicker to forgive – the faithful war-dodger or the promiscuous ex-soldier? His military service would not count in his defence – of course it would not, when thousands of men had been conscripted. But it was all so terribly unfair. He had spent four years fighting for his country – couldn’t they just leave him alone to live as he wanted after that?  
“It’s better that you don’t come to visit me again.” Mathias said.  
Lukas stiffened, his face tensing up into its old severity. “How so?” he asked, a challenge in his voice.  
“Just until the trial, I mean,” Mathias explained hastily. “The guards here are rather too observant, and I don’t want you being implicated in anything – you know, on account of what I’m in for.”  
“I understand,” Lukas said. “I’ll come to the trial.”  
“I promise you won’t hear anything new there,” Mathias assured him. “I’ve told you my truth already. I wanted you to know.

The visiting hour was almost over, and the wardens were beginning to ask the families to leave, some with more kindness than others. There was but one thing left to say.  
“Write to me, won’t you?” Mathias said. “As if I’m not in prison. As if you’ll see me in a day or two. As if I’m about to come home.”  
“I will.” Lukas promised. It was Mathias’s own promise, his broken promise, the one that had caused them both so many years of suffering. How he loved Lukas. How, having loved him, could that love ever vanish or diminish? He looked at him and longed, once again, for the glass to disappear. A single kiss from Lukas, and he would have been content to spend twenty years locked away.

“Move along now, lad,” came the voice of a guard, tapping Lukas on the shoulder. “Time’s up.”  
Lukas got to his feet, his hands trembling a little as he put on his jacket. It was the one Mathias had seen before, the one with the patched elbow. He beckoned Lukas to the hole in the glass.  
“I’ll see you at the trial,” he said in an undertone – then, after a pause, “My love.”  
Lukas’s cheeks flooded red, but he nodded. “My love.” he repeated.  
They could have talked for hours. They could have talked for their six lost years, and for the two they were about to lose. But the hour was up, and all Mathias could do was wait for Lukas to pause at the door and raise a single hand to him, a flag of surrender. And then he was gone, and it was time for Mathias to go back to his cell.


	11. Condemnation

Oh a deal of pains he's taken and a pretty price he's paid  
To hide his poll or dye it of a mentionable shade;  
But they've pulled the beggar's hat off for the world to see and stare,  
And they're haling him to justice for the colour of his hair.

Now 'tis oakum for his fingers and the treadmill for his feet  
And the quarry-gang on Portland in the cold and in the heat,  
And between his spells of labour in the time he has to spare  
He can curse the God that made him for the colour of his hair.

\- The Colour of His Hair, A.E. Housman (written about Wilde’s trial)

 

During the last few months I have, after terrible difficulties and struggles, been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint.  
\- De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

…

October 1920

On the night before his trial, Mathias stared at the flaking wall of his cell and wondered what he would say. He knew that Oscar Wilde had made some great speech, some beautiful speech, ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, all that. He had said it was natural, intellectual, misunderstood, and many of those present had booed him, but others had applauded. Mathias could not do the same. He was uneducated; he knew nothing of those who had set the precedent for men such as him, nothing of the graceful couplings of the Athenians, nothing of how his type of love had been glorified in art and poetry. He had no vast mental library to draw upon; he had only a collection of quotes from Dorian Gray, a dim recollection of the plot of the Iliad and a few snatches of the violent, elegant poetry of war. At any rate, he was not being tried for a crime of love, but rather for one of lust. By anyone’s standards – even by his own – such a thing was a sin. He was not being tried for loving Lukas, but for drunkenly propositioning a stranger. No one could write anything beautiful about that.

Perhaps God – perhaps fate – was finally punishing him for his promiscuity. No – it was the law. He had no God. Every morning at Asterley Hall, the family and servants had assembled in the entrance hall for morning prayers, and he had never listened, never believed. He had left God there, draped over the rack for visitors’ coats. Others had left him in the trenches, pierced with barbed wire, blown to bloody tatters by a mine. Lying awake in his cell, he had a strange feeling that he should be praying – that this was the time when believers did that sort of thing. He thought of all the war graves marked with crosses, and how so many of the men who had gone into them had left God behind.

Because he had no God, he decided to think of his father. He had never known him as a man – never learnt anything of his life or thoughts, and never come to see or know his faults and weaknesses. What he had was a child’s recollection – the shape of a song, but not its words or tune; a toy horse carved out of driftwood; watching a seagull dipping over the water as he waited for his father to finish chatting to some acquaintance or another. He had never been able to see himself in his father, and his father had never been able to tell him whether he was like his mother. Miserably, he wondered which of his sins would be the worst in his father’s eyes – his preferences, his promiscuity, or the fact that he had killed. Society had made its judgement clear, but it was a judgement that was difficult to accept. Most of all, he regretted the loss of his native language. In English, he thought bitterly, he was stupid – in Danish, he was silent.

…

Mathias shivered, his old coat useless against the cold. They had put the cuffs on too tight, let them rub painfully against the thin skin of his wrists. Accident or malice? He could not be sure. On the steps of the courtroom a small crowd had gathered to condemn him, despite the frost and despite the fact that it was a work day. As he approached the steps, he could feel the policemen on either side of him tighten their hold around his arms, restraining him as if he were dangerous. He felt himself burning with humiliation at being treated like a threat, like an animal incapable of controlling itself. Then again, what else had he shown himself to be? A sharp jerk, the graze of metal against his wrists, and he was forced to climb the steps. The sun was still low in the sky. In the army, they carried out death sentences at this time in the morning. It had always struck him as cruel to make a soldier wait, to make him see the dawn of his last day before they shot him dead.

The first insults split open the silence of the morning, flooding it with sound.  
“Pervert!”  
“Sodomite!”  
“Dirty queer!”  
Someone leaned forward out of the crowd and spat at him; the stuff landed heavy and warm on his cheek, and he could not raise his cuffed hands to wipe it away. He forced himself to look up, to maintain some appearance of dignity. Inside, he could feel a terrible rage boiling up, the sort he hadn’t felt since the war. In his mind’s eye, he saw bodies strewn across the ground, glazed-eyed, blasted open. He still knew how to fire a rifle, how to insert and retrieve a bayonet. He remembered stripping to the waist and plunging his arms into freezing water, the arms that were tattooed with other men’s blood. But the people gathered on the steps did not care that he had killed men – only that he slept with them, or tried to. They had not assembled that morning because of what he had done, but because of who he was. It was not the betrayal of Lukas, nor the shameful indifference with which he had treated the act of love, that had brought them out today. If he had been arrested in connection with someone he had loved faithfully for ten, fifteen, twenty years, the reaction would have been the same. No, it was the way he had been born that disgusted them. 

…

After the frost outside, the stuffiness of the courtroom took Mathias by surprise, warm as it was with the heat of bodies crammed in. The public gallery was full, the crowd on the steps now revealing itself to be a mere prelude to what had been awaiting him inside. People leaned over the edge, precariously balanced, shoved forward by the press of those behind them. Anxiously, he scanned the rows of faces for those he hoped would be there. Ah, yes – there was Gilbert at one end of the gallery. Their eyes met, but no smile or gesture passed between them. Fair enough, Mathias thought. He could understand Gilbert not wanting to be associated with a confirmed sodomite – he was on the verge of marrying, after all. It was enough, really, that he had come. And there, about halfway along was Lukas and – and here was a surprise – Emil, sitting beside each other, although quite clearly not together. A pity Gilbert hadn’t sat with them, Mathias thought, but then again, he probably still considered Lukas a bit of a snob.

Mathias watched them, the two brothers – Emil, with his scars that stopped the world from forgetting, and Lukas, who did not remember. Emil was inscrutable, his expression warped and hidden by the twist of his mouth. Lukas was looking down at the proceedings below, posing nonchalantly but really rather too stiff and pale to pass himself off as a disinterested observer. Mathias willed him to look at him, helpless in his enforced muteness, desperate to call his name. And then Lukas turned and caught his eye, and Mathias was undone. There was sorrow in the look they shared – profound sorrow, the sorrow of the crushed. There was sorrow, and an aching regret for all the things that had caused them to be in court that day – Lukas’s guilt, and Mathias’s prideful refusal to write, but above all the war. The war – was there nothing that it had not touched? Was there nothing left pure and alive and intact? It had been death; it had been a disease; it had walked between the rows of soldiers and touched like a blessing all those it wished to take with it. In Lukas, he saw the sorrow of their lost years, and knew that it was reflected in himself. And then the judge entered the courtroom, and all the spectators got to their feet, and the trial began.

Mathias was unfamiliar with the intricacies of the law, but he soon saw that he would have to listen to the prosecution condemning him before he had a chance to speak for himself. The man he had propositioned, the undercover policeman, came forward first and recounted the events leading up to the arrest. Mathias felt numb as he listened, divorced from the awful picture of him that the man was painting. According the testimony he was a drunkard, a working-class demon, an insouciant and insatiable sexual deviant. The man hated him without even knowing him; he hated him for the way he was, just like all those on the steps and in the gallery who had come to gawp.  
“And after you had feigned interest in him,” the judge said. “What did the defendant do?”  
“He asked me whether I wanted to go somewhere after, or words to that effect.” the policeman replied.  
“And there was no ambiguity as to his intentions?”  
The policeman shook his head. “No, my lord,” he said. “As he then told me that it would be impossible to – how shall I say this? – conclude our conversation at his lodgings, but that he knew other places where it was possible to do such a thing.”  
“And you arrested him after that?” asked the judge.  
“Yes, my lord,” the policeman confirmed. “I had heard enough of his intentions to bring a charge.”

Mathias could sense the sympathies in the room being shifted distinctly away from him. There were two other witnesses, both blackmailers who made a living out of getting sodomites into compromising positions and then extorting money from them in return for their silence. They frequented the same pub as he did; they had, they said, seen him there on several occasions, often leaving with men. “A different one every time.” one of them salaciously put it. Mathias could only imagine the hurt Lukas must be feeling, like a woman confronted by her husband’s mistress. He was glad, inexpressibly glad, that he had already told him the truth and left him with no more surprise betrayals. The prosecution finished, and Mathias was summoned forward to be questioned himself.

The interrogation began.  
“Are you Mathias Køhler?” asked the judge.  
“I am.”  
“And is your date of birth 5th June 1896?”  
“It is.”  
“What is your current address?”  
“The unmarried men’s boarding house at 28 Silver Street.”  
The judge leaned forward a little, addressing him more personally. “And what exactly influenced your choice of lodgings?”  
Mathias flushed nervously. It was a trap. They all wanted him to stumble, to admit to some perverted motive. “I’m a single man,” he said. “I’ve only got a little money. I can’t afford a flat, so it seemed like the best idea when I left the army.”

The judge seemed unable to find anything suspect in this answer, so he continued. “And what are your present and past occupations?”  
“I’m a stonemason, currently working on the restoration of the house at Lille Skarstind. Before that I served in the war, and before that I was in service.”  
The judge cleared his throat. “And… Would you consider yourself to be what certain people would call ‘rough trade’?”  
Mathias felt a twist of anger in his stomach. He knew what they all thought of him, how he must appear to them – poor, uneducated, rough around the edges and clearly morally hopeless. Stupid and reckless enough to get caught, to top all that off. “I’m a working man, if that’s what you mean.” he replied, a little stiffly.

The line of questioning continued, becoming more and more invasive. Every detail of his life was laid out as evidence.  
“And did you ever receive money or gifts from the men you associated with?”  
“Never. It was what it was. There was no talk of anything more.” They think I’m a renter, Mathias thought. A bloody renter, to add insult to injury.  
“How often did you frequent The Blue Ribbon, the place of your arrest?”  
“Once or twice a week. The night I got arrested, it was my first time there for two months.” 

The questions were narrowing their focus, coming down to the minutes that had led to him standing in the dock.  
“The prosecutor said that he bought you a drink that particular evening.” said the judge. Mathias could sense something else behind the words, a snare slowly being pulled tight.  
“He did.” Mathias replied.  
“And yet you said that you never received any gifts.”  
Mathias’s throat constricted. They were making a liar out of him, and perjury would be the final nail in his coffin. “I don’t really think drinks count as presents.” he countered weakly.  
“In that case, Mr Køhler, what sort of thing would you consider to be a gift?”  
Mathias shrugged desperately, his mind blank. “I don’t know… Money, clothes, a nice watch… Things like that, I suppose.”

The judge nodded. “Very well,” he said. “Moving on, did you intend to take things to their logical conclusion once you left the establishment?”  
Mathias could no longer help himself. “I never even touched him!” he protested. “He touched me. I thought he was interested.”  
The judge frowned; a couple of jurors shook their heads in disapproval. “But had he been as he first appeared, would you indeed have gone elsewhere?”  
Chastened, Mathias looked down at his scuffed shoes, beginning to feel nauseous. He was perspiring; he ached to remove his coat. “Yes.” he admitted.  
“You said that you could not go back to your own lodgings. May we take that as evidence that what you intended to do was of a criminal nature?”  
“You may.” The fight had gone out of him – he knew that, if he argued, it would be so much the worse for him.  
“And so where did you intend to take him?”

Mathias was not entirely sure. He thought of all the places he’d done it in – nasty, dirty, public places. Some of his one-nighters had their own flats if they had a bit of money, and he’d seen a few of him. One of them had had a painting above his bed, a watery bloom of red marked by tremendous slashes of black – one of those new paintings, where the image itself was almost irrelevant, and the power all in the meaning. It had been like looking into an open wound; like a representation of his own mental chaos. He had been unable to tear his eyes from it, even though there was really so little to see.  
“I hadn’t decided at the time of asking.” he replied.  
The judge nodded in acknowledgement. “You say he touched you,” he continued. “What was your reaction?”  
“I took it to mean he wanted to go with me,” Mathias said. “So I asked him if he would.”  
“You did not resist or recoil from the contact?”  
“No.”  
“And so can the court take that as evidence that you welcomed the prospect of committing the act of sodomy?”  
“Yes.” Mathias said, and he knew when he looked up at the unforgiving faces of the jurors that his trial was over.

There was a short interlude while the jury left to deliberate over the verdict; within fifteen minutes, they returned, having unanimously voted him guilty. There was an eruption of whispering in the gallery, and the judge called the court to order.  
“Mathias Køhler,” he said, once silence had been restored. “For the crime of attempted buggery, I sentence you to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.” He banged his gavel and the sentence was passed, indelible, irrevocable.

Mathias looked bleakly around him, up at the crowded pale circles of faces in the gallery. So this was justice. So this was how he would be punished for his infidelities – publicly, and as an example, held up to be ridiculed. He saw Gilbert, and saw how he was turned half away from the unedifying spectacle of the jeering crowd, and saw his struggle, torn between what the law said was wrong and what he knew of the friend he loved. The policemen came to drag him away again, and he just had time to catch sight of Lukas. They shared a last look – a look of love, of frustration, of desperation – and then he was forced to turn to face the doors and Lukas, once again, was lost to him.

…

November 1920

My Dear Mathias,  
It hardly seems right to start this letter by asking how you are, but I do hope that you are keeping as well as can be expected. Prison is yet another experience that you have had and I have not, but I have read De Profundis and it appears to me that a prisoner’s life is one of deep and endless misery – beautiful, artistic misery, but misery nonetheless. I have enclosed a copy here for you to read in your spare moments. I think you will find that Wilde writes rather movingly on the nature of sorrow.

As for myself, I am reasonably well, although I have left Lille Skarstind. The damp was giving me a terrible cough, and I decided that it was high time that I went elsewhere and found work. I have a job now, teaching Latin and Greek at my old prep school – although, as I am sure you can imagine, I am not a very good teacher. The boys irritate me easily, and it is tiring for me to have to talk all day – I write rather better than I speak, as you may have seen. In writing, I can express myself; in speech, I can but stumble. It was easy enough to get the job – my incomplete degree is down to no fault of my own, and at any rate one hardly needs a university education to make seven-year-olds recite verb tables. I have rooms here, so any letters should be sent to Whitefield Boys’ Preparatory School, Moreton, Hampshire.

And now I must state my message plainly. The beginning of this letter has, I suppose, in some ways been an extended prevarication as I work up the courage to say what I must. Courage. It is something that I seem to lack. The fact – the immutable fact – is that I did not go to war. You know that, as does Emil. What I must admit to you now is the amount of pain that this cowardly decision has caused me. The first time I saw Emil after the war – his face bulging with new scars, thin, haunted, given electric shocks every day in an attempt to wake him from the miserable torpor in which his mind had lost itself – he asked me if I had served. For the last two years of the war he had been oblivious, locked in his own despair, his face a reminder of the world’s sins – I rather see myself in our friend Mr Gray – and so he did not know what I had done, and when I told him, he refused to know me. It is no more than what I deserve.

I did not see what you did in the war, but I saw things that will haunt me for quite different reasons. It is a chilling thing to see a war reduced to paper, and whole regiments of men to blocks pushed over a map. I, of course, was not involved in all these great plans – really, I was something of a uniformed secretary – but I felt nonetheless like an assistant, and thus an accomplice, to these engineers of death. I lie awake sometimes, and remember how I saw the first day of the Somme laid out before me on a map.

The guilt of what I did not do is a constant burden. I ask not for your pity, nor for your understanding – I simply want you to know that I am truly aware of the wrong I did. You were right to say that I have alienated myself from my generation, and perhaps, I think, from my nation’s history as well. I will never, as long as I live, forgive myself for spending my two years of conscription safe behind a desk in a requisitioned chateau. I cannot, and I do not ask you or anyone to do so for me. And now I must tell you a little of what I feel for you.

The night before you left, after it was all over, I heard you sniffing and supposed you must be weeping. I longed to reach out and slip my hand into yours, but there was so much that prevented me, not least my own timidity. I felt horribly bruised, as if I had been thrown against a wall, and as if I had done some awful, shameful thing. I was afraid that if I held out my hand to you, you would seize it, twist it up, hurt me as I knew what had just happened must be hurting you. Or perhaps you would simply have moved your own hand out of the reach of mine.

Once you had gone, I held on to your photograph and found myself in bitter tears. I could not bear to think of you dying, and to think that you would die with us having parted on such bad terms. For the rest of the day, I was out of sorts. I was rude to the maid who came to help me pack. I snapped at my mother, and at Mr Kirkland. At dinner, I took a single mouthful and declared it awful. I was the worst version of myself – cold, cruel, and disdainfully spoilt. I was heartbroken, but I passed myself off as arrogant. It is what I am accustomed to doing. It is only to you, and only in writing, that I can tell some more of my feelings.

I cannot help but wonder how different things might have been if we had met as men, not boys, and in a world uninterrupted by war. I love you, and I will always care for you deeply, and it will not be terribly long until you are free and we are together.  
Love always,  
Lukas

The first letter arrived a few weeks into his sentence, on a cold, drizzly morning where the pain in his back almost kept him anchored to his bed. He broke rocks day in, day out – mind-numbing, physically draining work that kept him hunched over all day. Not even the blackly humorous thought that it would be good for his masonry skills could bring a smile to his face anymore. The days dragged by with agonising slowness, and he had just learnt that the five weeks he had served while awaiting trial would not be counted as part of his sentence. His nightmares had returned, and returned with a vengeance, and with such vividness that he could smell the blood in which they were soaked. His depression was deep, inescapably deep, and he was drowning in it.

The letter changed all that. Mathias did not tear it open straightaway as other men did with their post; instead, he slipped it into his pocket so that he could read it in the evening, in the privacy of his cell. All that day, he felt it against his thigh, tantalising him. His thoughts drifted to it constantly; he could not help but wonder incessantly about what it contained. The minutes inched by, and eventually there were enough to make an hour, then several, and then at last the working day was over and he was left alone in his cell.

Mathias felt tears gathering in his eyes as he read the letter. What a sad litany of mistakes and misunderstandings it was – the sorrows of an entire generation contained within a few pages. He imagined Lukas standing over a map, perhaps taking notes, then the hand of some pompous general or another reaching down, scattering the blocks across it, obliterating them all – Arthur, Emil, Mathias himself. He imagined Emil, his face only half repaired, sitting alone in a hospital room as the war raged through his mind like one of those grand murals of ancient battles. Last of all, and most painfully, he imagined the night he had spent in Lukas’s bed, and allowed himself to wonder what would have happened if they had taken each other’s hands, and shown each other just a little kindness, a little love. I love you, Lukas had written, and now Mathias reread the last paragraph, and felt the painful tenderness of it. A kiss. He would have given anything to have Lukas in his arms at that moment, and every moment of his life.

After a while, he set the letter aside and reached into the envelope to take out the book. It was a cheap, flimsy edition; according to the back, it had cost four shillings. He flicked through it and saw that it was Lukas’s own copy, with passages underlined and comments written in the same elegant handwriting as the letter. He skimmed through the introduction, by some distinguished author or another whom he had never heard of, then reached the work itself and began to read.  
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain…

It took several nights of struggling before Mathias finished the book, always too tired to take in more than a few pages before his eyes blurred and he found himself reading the same sentence several times over. It was the work of an educated man, perhaps a little too self-consciously intellectual, and Mathias was confronted again and again by the inadequacy of his seven years’ schooling by teachers who hardly knew anything themselves. He had had a girl of thirteen teach his class once; nervous, she had dropped the chalk, dropped it again when trying to pick it up, stood silent in front of the blackboard for a full minute while she tried to remember the spelling of a word. It was little wonder he knew nothing, he thought.

The book was full of references to things he had never heard of, quotes in languages he could not understand, words he did not know, and Lukas’s annotations hardly cleared things up. And yet, despite all the allusions that flew over his head and the words that he stumbled over, he could discern a clear thread running through it all – a thread that talked of suffering, and its power to change people. No, not power – compulsion. It was impossible to live through what he – what Wilde – had lived through and remain the same. The book talked of prison, but Mathias also saw in it echoes of his experiences in the war. One could never completely overcome such experiences; rather, they marked the division between pre- and post-, between the life lived before and the changed one that came after.

There was a thriving illegal economy inside the prison, a practice that was tolerated as long as the wardens were occasionally slipped a few cigarettes or a bottle of something, and through it Mathias managed to acquire two pens, a bottle of ink, several sheets and an envelope. He was nervous as he sat down to write; he had hardly put pen to paper in the last twelve years, and it seemed a daunting task to put his ideas into words, particularly when faced with Lukas’s formidable articulacy. But he was determined to press on. Never again would he be the one who did not write; never again would he torment Lukas with his silence. 

He picked up the pen and dipped it in ink, remembering as he did so the hours of handwriting practice at school, the struggle of forming his crooked, unconnected letters into some approximation of the neat copperplate examples pinned up on the wall. He could never have been a butler, he thought with a wry smile – not with all the written records they had to keep. Sighing, he dipped the pen again and began the laborious process of writing.

Dearest Lukas,  
Thank you for your letter, and also for the book. It was very interesting to read – not very easy, I must say, but I percevered because there was so much in it that was the same as what I think. I don’t write much or very well, but thats no excuse for never writing in the war, I know that. I’ll do my best to write properly and all the time now.

It hurts me now to hear about the way I hurt you. I didn’t think you loved me after that night. I thought you just wanted rough trade and that was me. I cried because I loved you and was dissapointed with the way things had gone. If you had held out your hand to me I would certanly have taken it. It’s a pity we never said we loved each other, isn’t it?

There are two reasons why I slept with so many men, and now they make me ashamed. The first is that I was trying to forget you because I did not know that you loved me. I thought that if I went with other people then I would be able to make it so that love meant nothing to me, and I would be able to live my life without the thought of you. As you have seen, it did not quite work like that.

The second reason is the reason why all soldiers did what I did. In the war I was capeable of terrible vilence and sometimes I feel as if I still am. I am afraid of myself sometimes, because I am still the same man as the one who killed all those other men. I hope you can understand that we were promiscus because it is an awful thing to know that you are a vilent man, and we needed to show ourselves that we could still feel things, even if we felt them for strangers. But I never felt anything for anyone but you. None of the others mattered to me. I don’t remember their names or their faces and I prefer it like that. There is only you, and how beautiful and clever you are, and how much I miss you, and how much I love you. I love you more than anything, even if what I’ve done makes you think I don’t.

I know you don’t want me to forgive you for not going to war, but I do forgive you. There are some men who are proud of not being conscripted, but you’re not one of them. I understand that you had a dillema and maybe if I had an old family name to protect I would have felt the same. You are a good person at heart. No one can feel as guilty as you do and still be bad. It is dificult , and it will always be dificult, because of what I’ve seen and you haven’t, but we can manage it. After, the men who get married manage it, and it’s not like their wives went to fight, is it? 

I’ve forgiven you, but I don’t know if Emil ever can. He’s suffered so much more than me, and the fact that you’re his brother I think makes it even worse. Be patient with him, and carry on going to see him, but don’t let him make you feel like you are evil or a criminal. He forgets the war is in the past because for him it’s still happening. As for me, I don’t think I will ever lose these memories, or the darkness I feel in me at night. I can never escape these things.

I hope to hear from you soon.  
With love,  
Mathias xx

After six months or so of their correspondence, Lukas wrote to Mathias with a change of address, telling him that he had left the school, worn down by the cold and draughts and miserable repression of boarding-school life that surrounded him and reminded him of his own education. He had gone back to Lille Skarstind for a quick inspection and found it all shut up and decaying. He had slashed the price; he was, he said, desperate for a buyer. His new job, a humble office position, paid only a little better than teaching, and he complained that he had to pay rent with it, and buy enough food not to starve, and meet the increasing cost of Emil’s accommodation. He had given his war money to charity. He loved him, and he wished they could be together again. Neither of them said anything about visiting. It would, they seemed to have tacitly agreed, be best not to create a reputation – best not to give the others prisoners any ammunition with which to torment Mathias.

Mathias read Lukas’s letters with something like wistfulness, longing to do as Lukas had done and simply leave and go somewhere else. It was strange to think that there were people who were free – he himself had almost forgotten what it was to have money in his pocket, and a choice of things to spend it on, and weekend hours not yet broken into that he could while away doing whatever he liked. But no, he thought – it was never like that. He was romanticising his own past – that carefree existence had never been his, apart from, perhaps, his brief years at Asterley Hall.

He had been happy there, happy with himself and with his promising career. He had been happy until being caught in the act with his first love had driven him to Lille Skarstind and into the arms of his second one – his true love; the grand, complicated, tempestuous passion of his life. Lukas. It was always him – from the moment of his birth, it was always going to be him. He had broken Lukas’s heart, and he could only but wonder how many others he had broken – how many of his one-nighters had hoped for something more: tenderness, love, a little human sympathy perhaps. The war had made him into a man he did not want to know. If he had broken hearts, it had been because the war had broken his own. It was the unacknowledged thing in society that brought together the men who drank and the men who beat their wives and the men who sat down at their kitchen tables and shot themselves. And yet no one, least of all the men who had sent boys to fight, would look at the spider at the centre of the web.

His letters to Lukas were not the work of an educated man, nor a cultured one, but he liked to think that they were, in some way, his very own De Profundis – his own cry from the depths. And so they wrote to each other, and Mathias let each day drift from his sentence, each one bringing him closer to his release – that blessed day, that long awaited day that would come early in October 1922.


	12. A Drawing-Down of Blinds

What candles may be held to speed them all?  
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes  
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.  
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;  
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,  
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.  
\- Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen

How many loved your moments of glad grace,  
And loved your beauty with love false or true,  
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,  
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.  
\- When You Are Old, W.B. Yeats

…

October 1922

It was early in the morning when they released him, with the sky a thin, tired shade of blue and everything glistening from the previous night’s rain. They took him through the echoing main hall with its twisting staircases and rows of locked doors, then down the corridor, past the silent workroom and empty dining hall. Mathias loathed the very familiarity of it. He hated every brick in the walls, every bar across the windows – everything that had kept him prisoner for two years, and for a crime where the only real victim had been himself. Enough of all that, he chided himself, but it was impossible not to feel bitter towards the laws and government that had stolen his youth from him.

He wore the same suit as he had on the day of his trial. It was loose on him now, made to fit a tall, well-built young man, not one worn out by hard labour and insufficient food. In a bag over his shoulder, he carried his few meagre belongings; in his pocket, bound together with a strip of fabric torn from the lining of his jacket, were his letters from Lukas – twenty of them, written at a rate of just under one a month. He ran a finger over the bundle, feeling the sharp edges of the paper; nervously, he thought of Lukas himself waiting outside to meet him, as he knew he would be. What would they say? How could they possibly begin again? 

They reached the governor’s office, where he had first been placed in the system two long years before. Forms were passed back and forth across the desk, signed with cursory flicks of the wrist; a few terse words were exchanged to the effect that he was free. Within a few minutes, Mathias thought, he would be free of the prison, but his name would remain on record – shameful, criminal, available to anyone who ever cared to probe into his background. But that was inevitable, really. One could not expect to go to prison and then live as if nothing had happened – if Wilde had taught him anything, it was that. He reached for his letters again, let them remind him of all the good that remained in his life. After all that had happened to him, he would not let a blemish on his name – the one thing he had from his father – be the thing that undid him.  
The governor turned to him, breaking his train of thought. “You’re a free man, Køhler.” he said.

…

As soon as Mathias was out of the gates, he saw that Lukas was waiting for him, as he had said he would in his last letter. He was leaning against the high boundary wall, buttoned up in a dark coat that looked new and smoking a nervous, pleasureless cigarette. He dropped it as Mathias approached, the light at the tip flaring once before he crushed it distractedly under his heel.  
“Lukas,” Mathias said, desperate to speak. “It… I…” He stumbled; he tripped over his thoughts; he staggered under the weight of the words he wanted to say. They were inches apart, and yet even now they could not touch each other – not here, not as the town began to wake around them, for even now there was a man on the other side of the road with the morning paper under his arm, a man turning to look at them.  
“I’ve come to take you home.” Lukas said simply.  
“Home?” Mathias asked – tentatively, childishly. It was all too good to be true – too much to believe. It was hard for him to think that, after all the years of interruption and disappointment, his trials were over; it was impossible to imagine that he had finally come through it all – that now, at last, he and Lukas would live together, with nothing to separate them.  
Lukas gave a wan smile. “Unless you’d like to go somewhere else first?” It was a question; he was not quite certain of himself.  
Mathias shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I’m quite happy to go home.”

They began to walk to the station, each casting nervous glances at the other, unsure of what to say. It was not as though they were short of things to talk about; it was more, Mathias felt, that they had so many that getting them all out seemed quite overwhelming.  
“New coat?” he asked eventually, then cursed himself for it. What if Lukas thought it was a criticism, a suggestion of frivolous spending when he was supposed to be poor?  
“Second-hand,” Lukas replied. “But hardly worn, I think.”  
Mathias turned to look at him. The rose of youth, it seemed, was wilting a little at the edges, but that was only to be expected. Lukas was a man, not a boy, and he was closer now to thirty than twenty – they both were. He was still beautiful, of course, but exhausted by guilt and sorrow and everything else. And Mathias still loved him, loved him with an intensity that he felt moving in some deep, ancient part of him. He could only be thankful – how thankful he could never hope to express – for Lukas’s quiet faithfulness, for his ability to forgive. Let him have his new coat, he thought.  
“It looks nice on you,” he said. “You look nice.” A gift for thinking up metaphors, he thought, would not be unwelcome at times like this.  
Lukas blushed faintly. “Thank you.” he replied.

For a while, they were silent. Mathias cast a glance at every person who passed them by, thrilled to be seeing faces unmarred by familiarity. The world, he felt, was unfolding again, wider and brighter than the dull, narrow vista he had been permitted in prison. He half-remembered the streets they were following, but the posters on the walls were new, and the dresses the women wore were different from the styles of two years before, and the record shop displayed the works of up-and-coming acts he had never had a chance to hear. His head spun with the sudden, dizzying broadening of his horizons.  
“How’s Emil?” he asked after several minutes. They had turned on to the main road that led up to the station, and Lukas had withdrawn two tickets from his coat pocket.  
“Much as you left him,” Lukas replied, tensing slightly so that the tickets were crumpled in his clenched hand. “He’s… a little more understanding, I think. Of all that went on, I mean.”  
“Is he happy where he is?” Mathias asked, wondering if Emil was still in that awful, sterile place crowded with the ghosts of living men.  
Lukas shrugged, his face darkening with his old sorrow. “That’s not really the word for it,” he said. “I’d like him to live with me – with us – but I don’t want him to have to be somewhere where he’s surrounded by people who don’t understand. Me, for one.” He laughed bitterly.  
“I’ll come with you to see him soon,” Mathias said as they climbed the steps leading up to the main hall of the station.  
“Yes,” Lukas agreed. “I think he’d like that.”

They had to wait an hour for the train. Mathias could tell that Lukas was embarrassed; that he had hoped to execute their journey seamlessly, and that he was annoyed that it had come to a slow halt here at the station.  
“Never mind.” Mathias said, trying to put him at his ease. He hardly minded the wait; he was content to watch the infinite variety of people coming and going, and to read the place names off the announcement board – all the places he was now free to visit, he thought. The 10:15 to London Euston was about to depart; the 10:20 to Cambridge had suffered a ten-minute delay. He was going somewhere, he thought with joy. At long last, after all his dreadful, unnatural confinement, he was going somewhere.  
“I’m sorry.” Lukas said, staring up at the board with his customary frown.  
“It’s not your fault.” Mathias reassured him. A young couple walked past them, part of the throng spilling out of the Brighton train. They walked arm in arm; the woman whispered something to the man and they both collapsed in conspiratorial giggles. Something in Mathias ached at the sight. If only he and Lukas could do that, he thought wistfully.  
“Do you want to go back outside?” Lukas asked.  
Mathias shook his head, his eye drawn to a small tearoom beside the ticket office. “You know,” he said, trying to be cheerful. “I can’t remember the last time I had something nice to eat.”

They took their seats next one of the windows that looked on to the bustling hall. Mathias, having agonised over the cakes for several minutes, eventually decided on a Victoria sponge; Lukas went for a simple cup of coffee and said he wasn’t hungry.  
“Is this alright?” Lukas asked, watching Mathias take the first bite.  
“Lovely.” Mathias replied, wishing he would relax a little. This solicitousness was something new in Lukas, this desperation for everything to go smoothly. Mathias wondered if they were lovers yet and, if not, when they would be. He looked at Lukas as he sipped his coffee, as graceful as always, his movements tight and self-contained. He looked like someone who had spent his whole life trying not to be noticed, Mathias thought.  
“Want a bit?” Mathias asked, positioning his fork to cut off a corner of the slice.  
Lukas shook his head. “It’s all yours.” he said. He pushed up his sleeve to check his watch.  
“We won’t miss it.” Mathias said kindly.  
Almost guiltily, Lukas let the sleeve drop. “Just making sure.” he mumbled.

Eventually, the time came for them to board the train. Mathias was excited to be travelling again and tried to be playful and make Lukas a little less tense.  
“I want the window!” he said jokingly as they found their seats, and managed to elicit a weak smile from Lukas as they sat down together.  
“We’re third class, I’m afraid.” Lukas said apologetically. A man came and sat across from them, then opened a tin box and extracted a large sandwich from it, which he began to eat. Crumbs dropped into his lap and onto the floor, and Mathias saw a frown of upper-class disapproval cross Lukas’s face. It amused him, for some reason.  
“Suppose I’ll be among my people then,” Mathias replied in an undertone, and was gratified to see Lukas’s answering smirk. “How long is the journey, again?” he asked.  
“About five hours,” Lukas replied. “I came up yesterday evening and stayed in the railway hotel.”  
Mathias gave an exaggerated sigh. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pack of cards, would you?”   
“I’ve got a book.” Lukas offered.  
“It’s not in Latin, is it?” Mathias joked.  
“I’m afraid it is.” Lukas said ruefully.  
Mathias couldn’t help but laugh. They smiled at each other, and Mathias was filled with the simple warmth of shared affection. He felt at last that he had a reason to be hopeful. They would be alright, the two of them, once everything was all ironed out, he thought.

At any rate, Mathias spent most of the journey asleep, the profound exhaustion of his miserable two years weighing on him with the dull coldness of death. It was a purifying sleep, deeper and calmer than anything he had experienced for years. Once or twice, a dream flickered out of the darkness to disturb him; he forced it away. At one point, the veil of sleep was brushed half aside so that he became aware of the rattling of the engine, and the hard press of the windowsill against his shoulder, and the semi-rhythmic sound of Lukas turning pages.  
“Are we nearly there?” he asked, mumbling like a drowsy child.  
“There’s another while yet.” Lukas replied gently.  
“Suppose I’ll just go to sleep again then.” Mathias said, somewhat disappointed.  
“Have you been ill?” Lukas asked, concerned.  
Mathias shook his head as much as his position leaning against the window allowed. “Just tired.” he reassured him.  
“I’ll wake you when we’re coming into the station.” Lukas promised.  
“Thank you.” he replied, and closed his eyes again. There was a murmuring of conversation, and the swish of a turning page, and the darkness behind his eyelids deepening as the sun slipped out of the sky, and then he was asleep once more.

…

They reached home in the darkness of late evening, after a long walk from the station through narrow, low-rent streets cold and bright with frost. Lukas had two rooms at the top of a poorly-kept old house that lurched drunkenly on its foundations, leaning forward so that the street nearly came to a point overhead where the houses came close to meeting in the middle. It seemed that the crush of habitation on either side was the only thing that kept these terraces – the previous century’s breeding grounds for cholera – from collapsing into dust.  
“Watch your step now,” Lukas said curtly, just in time for Mathias to trip. “The electricity’s been gone for days.” The stairs were uneven and uncarpeted, the only source of light a weak glow that seeped out from under some of the doors.  
Mathias did not reply. Lukas had become quieter and quieter the closer they had come to the house, lapsing into his old silence. He was, Mathias realised, profoundly ashamed of his circumstances. An argument drifted out of one of the rooms, grating and spiteful. How he longed for him and Lukas to have a home from their own, and for freedom from everyone else’s struggles. But that would come later, he thought. For the moment, he was simply content that they would be living together.

They had reached the landing, and Lukas was bending to fit the key in the loose, rattling lock. Mathias noticed that he was shaking slightly, then more and more as the battle with the key continued. Eventually, there came the reassuring click.  
“Here we are,” Lukas said flatly. “I can’t say much for its comfort or its beauty, but it’s a place to sleep.”  
The door opened into total darkness. There was the hiss of a match being struck, then three small flames leapt up in quick succession as Lukas touched the it to the half-finished candles on the tablr, then Mathias heard his sharp, pained inhalation as the match burnt down to his fingertips. Lukas picked up one of the candles, lit five more with it, and then there was at last enough faint light by which to see. In the glow, Mathias saw the glint of gilded spines along the bookshelf, and a modest dining table with two chairs, half a loaf of bread on the sideboard, a fireplace with a tin bath in front of it and a coal scuttle which was almost empty. Apart from the books, there was nothing from Lille Skarstind - nothing to elevate this haphazard domesticity into anything grander. Lukas, it seemed, had abandoned the old house entirely.

Mathias looked around his new home for several minutes. It was the beginning of his life, he thought - a place that, no matter how temporarily, he would share with his true love. Lukas had turned away from him, burying himself in spurious chores, rearranging things in the cupboards with no real aim in mind. Mathias could see that he was nervous - that he was unsure of exactly how two people who had experienced as much as they had might go about building a new life together.  
"Lukas." Mathias said simply. Lukas turned to him, his face open and vulnerable - the mask dropped and shattered, his thoughts plain - and Mathias held out his arms.

For the first time in eight years - for the first time ever, since they had never held each other with such tenderness - they embraced. Standing there, with Lukas in his arms and their foreheads pressed together, Mathias felt a calm that he had forgotten. They breathed together, in a soft rhythm, and there was no need for further words. And although it was true that Mathias loved Lukas with his body as much as his soul, for the moment it was enough to simply stand there, and hold him, and put his hands on his lower back and feel through them the faint movement of his breathing. It was all very chaste, and quite beautiful.

Mathias reached up to brush Lukas's cheek with his fingertips. He was in love, so in love - for eight years now, he had been in love. They moved slightly away from each other, and Mathias leaned forward to kiss him. He kissed Lukas, and the kiss was returned, softly and without the urgency of their last one. They had been nervous then, pressing on with everything before they had a chance to falter, and mortally afraid of death. He was without that fear now, and the unopened years stretched out before them. Children, he thought of their younger selves - young men with the irrationality of boys, who knew nothing, who had mistaken the thought of love for the feeling itself and who had suffered more than anyone should suffer for their error.  
"I love you." Mathias said once they broke apart, putting every ounce of his sincerity and conviction into the words.  
"I love you too." Lukas replied, and Mathias began to cry.

It was the agony of the knowledge that their years of his separation had been his own fault that broke him - the pain and guilt of having no one else to blame. And it was not only the thought of what they had lost but also of what had been taken from them - their youth, their chance to get to know each other. He wept like a child, his face pressed into Lukas's shoulder, feeling so tired, so distraught that Lukas was the only thing holding him up; the only thing preventing him from falling to the ground, from falling into hell.

"We never had the chance to be young." he said, his voice thick and muffled with tears. It was the tragedy of their generation, the generation that had slipped through the cracks, the thousands who had gone from children to old men.

Lukas, he knew, was not someone to whom kindness and tenderness and the right thing to say came easily, and yet it was in Lukas's arms that he felt more loved than he ever had - safer and more loved and more peaceful. He wept for the cruelty of the world, and for love of this fragile good that had risen from the ashes.  
"I don't think I'll ever be young." he said.  
"I know, I know." Lukas replied soothingly, as if comforting a child after a nightmare. Yes, Mathias thought, he felt like a child - all these years of having to be a man, and yet he was still no more than a child. He felt like he was five years old - five years old, the age he'd lost his father.

After a while, he straightened up and drew a tired hand across his dully burning eyes. He sniffed. It would be alright, he thought. His memories rippled through his mind, troubling his calm, but it would be alright.  
"I'm so sorry for the way I treated you." he mumbled.  
"I forgive you." Lukas said.  
"I'm just so tired." Mathias continued.  
"You must be," Lukas said. "After everything that's happened."  
Mathias looked around the room and felt his eyes blurring with tears again. His life was beginning. "I'm just..." He paused, swallowed, started again. "I'm just so glad to be home."

...

It was not until several weeks after their reunion that they made love for the second time - or, all things considered, the first. It was a tacit agreement of theirs, an unspoken understanding that they would wait, and do as they should have done before by letting things move at their natural rate.

In the meantime, Mathias took pleasure in the simple joy of having someone to come home to. It had been easy enough to find work again - in every town and village, war memorials were being commissioned, and every stonemason in the country would be employed for years. It was a sombre task, and he worked with a constant knot of anxiety in his stomach - a fear that, somewhere on the least, he would encounter the name of an old friend. He never did, but the countless names told their own wretched story, even if he could not put a face to any of them. But he tried to rid himself of this sadness whenever he came home to Lukas. They would make a sort of race out of it sometimes, a good-natured competition to see who would get there first. Most evenings, Mathias would lose, having lingered to chat to his workmates, and would come home to see Lukas sitting at the table absorbed in a book or the day's paper, or trying to light the temperamental stove, or preparing their dinner. He always left off his work when Mathias came in, always gave him one of his rare, shy smiles. Mathias would never get tired of their kisses, he decided. They had eight years to make up for, after all.

Mathias considered himself to be a happy man - he was in love, and he had work, and he had somewhere to live, but he could never have called his life perfect. He still had dreams of the war, sickening dreams of the blood he had spilled, and sometimes he had to stop his work for a few minutes, caught by a rush of violent anger, by the battlefield madness that turned the chisel in his hand into a weapon. He knew that, somewhere in his mind, there was something twisted or snapped, too deep and broken to be fixed. He could only be thankful that it had not been any worse. Lukas had taken him to see Emil only once since his release from prison, and it had been a painful comedy of manners, with Emil bitter and intractable and Mathias affected, as he always was, by the thought of how close he had come to madness. The day had been a disaster, frostily silent, Lukas's questions met with disdain by Emil, who clearly begrudged him his happiness. On the way home, Lukas had been his old, reserved self.  
"This godforsaken war." he had said through clenched teeth once they had closed the gates behind them, then said nothing more for the rest of the night.

But no, Mathias thought as he fitted his key in the lock, he was happy. He had a key, after all - his own key, which he needed to gain entry to his own home. And Lukas had a key that looked the same, because the two of them lived together - together! What joy! They had had to tell the neighbours that they were friends, but that hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. That particular evening, he was home later than usual, having accepted the invitation of one of his new friends to join a few of them at the pub. He no longer drank - had been ribbed by all of them on account of it - but as he opened the door and hung his dust-ingrained working jacket on it, he felt almost tipsy with the pleasure of good company.

As he entered, Lukas looked up from the apples he was chopping and Mathias, still glowing from his evening, felt a sudden surge of love for him, a love that was closely allied with desire. Lukas was so perfect. He was no longer the boy he had been, the beauty cast in the classical mould of the type that sent men into raptures, but Mathias would never tire of looking at him.  
"Are you going to come in?" Lukas asked, a little sharply, and Mathias realised that he was staring.  
"When I've finished looking at you." he replied.  
"I haven't changed since this morning." Lukas countered, staring down at the counter to hide his blush.  
Mathias went over to him. "Maybe I should just reassure myself," he said teasingly. "These things have a habit of creeping up on people," He pulled Lukas close to him, spun him round playfully so that they were facing each other. He held him tightly, kissed his soft lips and the corners of his eyes where faint lines, like the cracks in a porcelain glaze, had begun to appear. Mathias had never known anyone to worry so intensely, nor so silently. "It seems,"he said eventually. "That you've got even more beautiful since this morning."  
"Really?" Lukas asked, putting on a show of scepticism.  
"Really," Mathias confirmed, kissing him again, more deeply this time. He was beginning to feel aroused. It felt right, he thought, a natural feeling accompanied by the love from which it had, in his experience, so long been divorced. It was time, they both seemed to be silently saying - they had waited, and now it was time. They parted, and Mathias felt Lukas's heartbeat and his own, together, clamouring, pounding, an exhilarating rush. "My love, my love, my love." he said, a desperate hitch in his voice.

"My love," Mathias said again, pressing his lips into the juncture between neck and shoulder. "My Lukas."  
Lukas breathed in sharply. "I love you." he murmured.  
"I want to make love to you." Mathias said, knowing that it was, at last, the right thing, at the right time, with the right person. Lukas. Lukas was always the right one for him.  
"Yes." Lukas said simply, as he had on the night of their first kiss, the night before their separation. But this time, there was no doubt in either of their minds, no fear, no awkwardness, and tonight would sweep away whatever had come before.

They went into the bedroom where, for weeks, they had slept chastely together, but never done more than that. Mathias was glad that they had had the good sense to wait. They undressed, with assurance this time, without blushes or missed buttons or eyes that were not sure where to look. Mathias held his hands loosely over his scar, nervous, not wanting any memory of the war to intrude on their love, then let them fall away so that he could embrace Lukas - hold him, run his hands and mouth over his perfect body, feel the cool skin warming to his touch. It was beautiful. He had Lukas in his arms, their bodies together, their souls about to be joined, and it was beautiful.  
"Oh, Lukas," he said, catching hold of Lukas's wrist and kissing his fingertips. "To think I might never have seen you again."  
"I know," Lukas replied. "And to think I spent so long thinking you were dead."  
"And I spent years thinking you never loved me." Mathias said, kissing him again, the words absurd even to his own ears, such a ridiculous conclusion to draw from his own silence, their shared foolishness.  
"I always did." Lukas reassured him - reassured him again, Mathias thought, in his own quiet way, of his fidelity.  
"As did I," Mathias said, taking his hand and leading him to the bed - their bed. "As did I."

They made love then, and Mathias found himself weeping with the sublime happiness of it all - weeping the clean, pure tears of the absolved. It was nothing like their first time, and nothing like what he had had with any of his one-nighters. There was no fear of death now, and no fear for his own humanity, because he knew now, having loved and been loved that, no matter the sufferings of his past, he was still human. It was love that made this time different from all the others - it was a sustained passion, profound and mature, the love of two people who had lived long enough to understand it. Mathias felt a peace descend on his soul, a peace that filled the place in him where before there had been darkness.  
Mathias ran his thumbs over Lukas's protruding hipbones. He brushed his fingers against his stomach, the buttressed sweep of his ribs, and his thumbs caressed the length of his two collarbones then met, almost, as he brushed them over his cheeks. To touch him like this, as he had dreamed of doing for so long, was incredible - joy of joys, Mathias thought through the pleasurable haze of his mind, wonder of wonders. He did not think of his one-nighters. They were gone for the moment, though not eradicated - for now, finally, the past had given him a reprieve. It was waiting for him, he knew, just outside the door, but it was elsewhere. He kissed Lukas again, long and lingering, deeply passionate but far too imbued with love to be lustful. He gave Lukas his soul - gave it and gave it and gave it, and though it was naked and bloody and scarred with a thousand scars and blackened and bruised with his years of shame and guilt, it was part of him and all of him. It was the most precious thing he had to give, and he gave it without reservation.

Once it was over, and they were lying in each other's adoring arms, breathing together, the silence like the silence at the end of a storm, Lukas told Mathias that he had found a buyer for Lille Skarstind.  
"An American millionaire," he said. "Loves England and everything in it. Said he can't wait to raise a family there. The letter came this morning. He's got the money for a project like that." he said, his voice a little bitter, filled with the residual shame of being the last in his family, the one to lose the house and name.  
"You're not happy about it, are you?" Mathias asked, stroking his hair.  
Lukas sighed and shifted position so that he was lying with his head on Mathias's shoulder. "I should be," he said. "I'll have money for Emil now, and maybe for us to live somewhere better. But if my parents knew I'd sold it..." He tailed off.  
Mathias pressed a soothing kiss to his brow. "We'll talk about it in the morning," he promised. "But not tonight. Let's not worry about anything, just for tonight."

…

February 1983 (Epilogue)

"And would you like to purchase a guidebook for £3, sir?"  
Mathias dug into his pocket for the right money, found by feel three of the small, thick pound coins and placed them on the till. The young woman at the desk took the money, smiled at him in the patronising way that the young reserve for the old and handed him his guidebook and ticket.  
"You can come and go at any time, but if you leave and come back, make sure you keep your ticket to show that you've already paid."  
"Thank you." Mathias said. I know how tickets work, Lukas would have snapped, proud and irritated. She pitied me, Mathias thought, because I'm an old man on my own. He had lost his Lukas, three months ago now, sixty years almost to the day since the first night they had made love in their rented room. They had had long enough, he thought. He could only be grateful that, after all that had happened, they had come together at all. That was what he told himself, day after night after day, when the bed they had shared seemed cold and empty, and Lukas's bookmark travelled no further through Political Life in Ancient Athens and he did everything alone, in silence, and, like the months following the war, everything he saw or touched sent some memory or another rushing to the surface. It was not only that he missed him; it was that he did not know how to be without him.

Sighing, he opened the guidebook and flicked through. There was a map of the grounds, a page about the history of the house, a few pages about the architecture and interiors and several that encouraged visitors to try the restaurant and gift shop. Advertising! he heard Lukas's voice say. And to think we paid for this! He smiled sadly at the thought and turned to the page marked 'History'.

Lille Skarstind, he read, was begun in 1690 as a gift to Sigurd Bondevik, the closest friend of Prince George of Denmark, husband of Princess Anne of England, who in 1702 became queen. The house was completed in 1696 and in 1710 was inherited by Bondevik's eldest son...

Mathias skimmed the rest of the paragraphs, the story of wealth and the loss of wealth, his eyes alighting on the last one.

In 1922, after years of financial struggles, during which the house had fallen into disrepair, it was sold to Alfred Jones, an American oil millionaire, by Lukas Bondevik, the last in his family to inherit the house. Jones, a lifelong Anglophile, carried out a thorough programme of restoration and, upon his death in 1959, left the house to the National Trust for the public to enjoy.

The house has been furnished to replicate how it would have appeared during the 1750s, at the height of the family's wealth.

Mathias closed the book, feeling the dullness of expected disappointment. The house, he knew, would be more beautiful than he or Lukas had ever seen it - as he walked slowly, laboriously, up the hill, he could see that the gardens were different - trimmed back, ordered, redesigned, with information boards covered with accessibly large print located at intervals along the path. And people walked around and ate their picnics and commented on the unseasonably warm weather, and knew nothing of the sorrows of the old man steadily climbing the hill.

Eventually, he reached the top, silently marvelling at the thought that he had managed to cycle ten miles here every morning, and then climb the hill, and then do a full day's work and still feel no more tired than could be expected at the end of it. He was old, he thought, and he was mortal. All his life, death had stalked him, and he had feared it, but now it was welcome. It was the thing that would bring him back to his Lukas, if there was life after death, if there was anything.

He stood in front of the house, looking up at the sweep of the façade. It had been cleaned and polished, the cracked windows replaced. The fountains, the old fountains that had sputtered and spat and then lain silent now fired up together, their jets in full flow. It was here that he had met Lukas for the first time, master and servant, fulfilling the roles they had been trained for in a world that had only a few months left before it broke into pieces. It was here that he had fallen in love. He could remember that day - the thickness of the heat, the rattle of the feeble streams of water hitting the bowls of the fountains, and the two brothers standing there, home from school. Lukas standing there, and Mathias, from the moment their eyes first met, falling for him.

And, of course, Emil had been there too, as yet unbroken. His ending had not been a happy one. War had broken out again in 1939, and his home had been requisitioned for the flood of new mental cases about to come in, the next generation of half-alive boys. He had come to live with Mathias and Lukas, by then living in their own house and known to their neighbours as Mr Køhler and that friend of his who lived with him, Mr Bondevik. His cough had got worse over the years since the war, as everyone had always known it would, and by the time he had moved in with them it had been in its final stages. Mathias remembered Lukas during those years, how he would slip out of bed two, three, four times a night to look in on Emil. Emil had never called him his brother again, never talked about their shared childhood or family history, and Mathias knew that the broken relationship was the one irreparable crack in Lukas's heart, his eternal shame that had plagued him until death. And Emil had died, finally coughed himself to death, on a night in 1941 when the city was bright with the fires of bombs.

They had been the only two people at his funeral, too profoundly exhausted to make excuses for their relationship, denuded by grief, unable to be anyone but themselves. And the vicar - you only got church funerals back then, Mathias remembered - had looked from one of them to the other, then would not look at either of them.  
"It was this war that killed him," Lukas had said later, through his tears, as they lay sleeplessly in the thick darkness of the Blackout. "He couldn't bear another war."

Mathias entered the house. Someone held the door open for him, and he smiled an embarrassed thanks. He wished, sometimes, that people wouldn't do things for him. For God's sake, he heard Lukas say in his mind's ear, did I ask for help? The young tour guide in the entrance hall asked to see his ticket.  
"Welcome to Lille Skarstind," he said, with the same smile as the one that the woman in the ticket office had given him. "All rooms on the ground floor are open to visitors, and we have some photographs of the other floors for visitors less able to manage stairs."  
"I'll be fine." Mathias said, finding it harder and harder to be polite. I don't think much of that boy, his inner Lukas remarked tersely. Who's he to be making assumptions like that?

A few minutes later, a little out of breath from the stairs, Mathias found himself standing in the room where his troubles with Lukas had begun, and where, years afterwards, he had heard the truth of what he had done in the war. It was different, of course, decorated in a style that had preceded both of them, and the bed with the red curtains was gone - firewood, most likely, and he was glad of it - but the shape of it was the same. The bed was in the same place as the old one, and so was the desk, and the ornate fireplace had not been changed, but the memory of having been there before was overpowering. He stood there, and Lukas's story echoed in his mind, the anguish as fresh as it had always been for Lukas, the shame as acute.

But Lukas was not with him, and Mathias missed him so much that the pain was almost physical. A couple entered the room, loosely holding hands, chatting brightly. Not once in sixty years had Mathias been able to hold Lukas's hand. He left the room. There was nothing more to see. There was no trace of Lukas here in the house, nothing more than a stubbed-out branch on the family tree, his name not linked to anyone else's.  
"I would have liked to marry you." Mathias had said to Lukas once, not so many years ago, when they were already old.  
"Don't be ridiculous." Lukas had replied, an impatient sadness in his voice - an awareness of improbability.

Mathias went out into the garden to eat his meagre picnic, a sandwich and an apple, and watched the world passing him by. He was desperately lonely. He would go home, and there would be no one there to talk to, no one to have dinner with, no one to fall asleep beside. His life with Lukas had been heavy with sorrows, their eight turbulent years impossible to ignore, but it had also been the happiest life he could have had with anyone. They had travelled the world together, and learnt the wonderfully similar languages of their ancestors, and seen the real Skarstind. He could remember so many times where they had laughed until they cried, Lukas correcting his spelling with good-natured impatience, the hundreds of books they had got through together, the sublime joy of their lovemaking. For now, Mathias thought, his memories would have to be enough. He did not expect to live much longer - did not expect to have to struggle much further without his beloved Lukas. He loved him with a love that was inexpressibly deep, a love that had for so long been a secret.

He reached into his bag and took out a book, one of the many Lukas had given him as part of his lifelong quest to 'civilise' him, as he had put it. It was Paradise Lost, a story of exile that reminded Mathias of one night, a good thirty years ago now, when they'd been driving through the area on the way home from somewhere. He couldn't remember which of them had suggested it now, but they had ended up driving halfway up the hill so that Lille Skarstind was just visible.  
"Do you want to drive up and have a look?" Mathias had asked Lukas, but there had been a light shining in an upstairs window, and the house had belonged to someone else.  
"No," Lukas had said, his voice brittle. "I wish I hadn't seen it. I'm never coming back." For the rest of the journey, he had gone into one of his silences.

Mathias opened the book to the front and read the inscription there, dated Christmas 1955. It brought tears to his eyes, now that his Lukas was gone and the memories the only thing left of him.

To my dearest Mathias,  
My paradise is wherever you are.  
With all my love, forever,  
Your Lukas xx

He turned to the last page, to the lines that, on his first reading, had struck him as a perfect summing-up of their lives together, the marriage - oh, if only they could have married! - of sorrow and hope, of two people who had done things for which they could never forgive themselves. It was a poor sort of love that ignored the sins of the lover - it was the best and most precious sort that acknowledged them and carried on regardless. It was the love he had shared with Lukas, the love of the damaged soldier and the guilt-ridden coward, as Lukas had always seen himself. It was the greatest sort of love, the love of two people who knew the worst of each other, and who gave the best of themselves. He looked down at the page, and read in the lines there the story of their lives:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;  
The World was all before them, where to choose  
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:  
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,  
Through Eden took their solitary way.

…

Author’s Note: Well, it’s finally finished! I hope you enjoyed the sort of happy ending (I’m a wimp who can’t write smut, so I hope you liked the big block of purple prose OTL). 

I’m probably going to go on a bit here, because this story has been so close to my heart – the very first seeds of it were sown almost a year ago now, and the writing itself has taken seven months (sorry to anyone who’s followed from the beginning!) I personally think this is my best story to date, and I’ve put more of myself into it than anything else. The First World War, and its effects on the people who fought in it, is a subject of great interest to me. I chose not to give Emil a happy ending because there were so many soldiers who didn’t have one either, and who suffered lifelong injuries just like his. I chose not to write a reconciliation between the two brothers because, again, the war broke some relationships beyond repair. I felt a genuine responsibility to write realistically, and I couldn’t have done that if I’d tied everything up to the mutual satisfaction of all the characters.

The story is full of guilt and shame, and so were many of the soldiers. Many, like Mathias, were followed by the war all their lives – some, like Emil were overcome by it. It’s important to remember how young all the characters are at the beginning of the story – Mathias is an eighteen-year-old boy who wants to do something to distinguish himself and be more than just a servant, and Lukas is another eighteen-year-old who’s been raised to take his place in a world that’s about to vanish. I’ll be turning seventeen in a few days, and I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to be just a year older than I am now and to be faced seriously with the prospect of death.

I’ve read a lot of war poetry, and a lot of novels about the war, and I would highly recommend absolutely anything by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. In particular, I believe the verse from Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth quoted at the start of this chapter is the most exquisitely beautiful piece of poetry to come out of the whole war, particularly the final, melancholy ‘drawing-down of blinds’. I also recommend Owen’s Mental Cases and Sassoon’s Repression of War Experience and Dead Musicians for a real insight into the minds of shell-shock victims such as Mathias and Emil – an illness that we now know to be PTSD. In terms of prose, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front is an excellent novel, which I read while writing this, about the German war experience, written by a real ex-soldier. Also, Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks, is one of the great novels about the war, although I personally thought it focused a little too much on the romance, at least near the beginning, and another Faulks novel, Human Traces. The war is a comparatively minor part of this one, but it’s my favourite book, and I hope one day to rival the spectacular, devastating beauty that is Faulks’s writing at its best.

I just want to thank you all for reading, and for waiting so patiently for the sinfully late updates. I’m in Year 12 right now, and I’ll only get busier next year, so I’m not sure when or if I’ll return to the fandom, but if I do write another chaptered fic, you can be pretty sure it’ll be a DenNor AU with at least one foot in the past!


End file.
